Mixed media on paper

105 × 105 cm. 41 3/8 × 41 3/8 in.

PROVENANCE
Important Private Collection, Asia

Note: This work is registered in the Lalan Archives lalanarchive.org

The Dance of the Hand, the Stunning Beauty of a Reflection
The Important Masterpieces of Lalan

Lalan was born in a distinguished family in Guizhou in 1921. She showed great talent in vocal music and dance at an early age. In 1948, she moved to France with her husband, Zao Wou-Ki. She settled in Montparnasse, the golden land for art in Paris, where she hung out and communicated with Sanyu, Sam Francis, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu and other reputational artists. While absorbing western artistic ideas, she also sought her own artistic voice. Lalan, who had loved dancing and music since she was a child, entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris a year after arriving in France. She was deeply influenced by Martha Graham, the founder of modern dance. Later, she returned to the subconscious instinct of the body in dance and extended to the intuitive expression of painting, which corresponds with the spontaneous creation ideas of Jackson Pollock and Kazuo Shiraga. In vocal music creation, she learned composition from Edgar Varese, the father of electronic music. She believed that "the movement of painting is driven by the sound and movement existing in the body" and integrated what she had learned into one another to develop her special "comprehensive art".

Since the 1960s, she has held solo exhibitions at Galerie R. Creuze, Galerie 7, Galerie Hélène de Beauvoir, with Eugene Ionesco, a playwright of absurd thetre, and Vadime Elisseeff, the director of the Musée national des Arts asiatiques-Guimet, wrote the introductions for her. Lalan's works also further transformed in the comprehensive expression of dance, music, calligraphy and landscape. Her paintings gradually turned from the stillness in the 50s and 60s period to soft and delicate transcendence in the 1970s. Her oeuvre at this stage reached the creative peak of rich implication and spiritual unity.

Dance of Flowers (Lot 46), completed in 1970 by Lalan, is an outstanding masterpiece with a deep sense of self-portrait. It can be regarded as an essential representation of her artistic transition in 1970, demonstrating her aesthetic achievement of integrating dance into abstraction and connecting self with creation. This work has been exhibited in the important retrospective exhibition of Lalan held by the Shanghai Art Museum and Macau Museum of Art. It has also been included in 5 representative albums of Lalan. At the same time, we present another piece of her: Untitled (Lot 45), completed in the 1980s, which demonstrates the touching sound of the pure land of abstract art.

A Portrait of the Blooming Life of a Dancer

"Dance of Flowers shows the dancers' dashing movements in a bold and wild style. The washing of oil paint creates the dancing lines, and the traces produced by time and space are presented in the painting."

――Yang Zijian, deputy director and curator of Macao Cultural Bureau

In Lalan's artistic life, dance is her lifelong love. After she went to France in 1949, she happened to watch a documentary about the dancer Graham, which strengthened her determination to learn modern dance. Unlike classical ballet or Chinese dance, which have a particular rigorous dancing style, modern dance gave her the freedom to express her intuition and subconscious fully. Dance also inspired her to create spatial expression through integrating dancing movements into painting movements. In the 1970s, Lalan actively expanded her multimedia performances, including collaborations with renowned Japanese choreographer Hideyuki Yano. In her solo exhibition at Galerie Jacques Desbrières in Paris in 1971, she performed modern dance in front of her paintings and played her own electronic music, being the pioneer in integrating music, dance and painting. Dance of Flowers is just like a self-portrait of her life.

In Graham's modern dance concept, spiral rotation is the dancer's way of using the body to express the inner. This spirit is also shown in Lalan's Dance of Flowers. Imagining her dance rhythm and breathing, Lalan fused body language harmony with the calligraphy brush. Her painting is like her dance rhythm, forming a waving flour with purple colour and ink, showing her identity as a dancer, spinning and blooming in the world of silvery. Two straight lines are like swaying stems running down from the sky, piled up and staggered, echoing the movement between expiratory and inspiratory. Like time-lapse photography, create a rich visual image that will be unforgettable forever.

The Waltz of Flowers Creates the Aesthetics of Ink Painting

In addition, to represent a self-metaphor, Dance of Flowers's name is also inspired by the climax part Waltz of the Flowers in Russian composer Tchaikovsky's famous ballet The Nutcracker. Following the familiar waltz, a dancer seems to dance in Lalan's painting. Lalan slowly rendered the colours, making the pigments in the natural fusion of each other, creating a misty visual perception, showing the aesthetic conception of Chinese ink painting. In the painting, a touch of violet rises from the wind, like a blooming flower or a flying butterfly. Along the way, flowers root on the earth. With a melody composed of vertical and horizontal structures, the bottom-up blooming posture of life is presented abstractly and aesthetically. Lalan put herself into the painting and stood alone in the grand world, expressing her aspirations and declaration to the world from the heart. She composed the ultimate art song that she would pursue and believe in all her life.

When Autumn's Golden Wind Embraces Dew of Jades: 1980's Abstract Art of Lalan

In the 1970s, Lalan was highly recognized by the French art circle with her artistic achievements: In 1975, she received the Chevalier medal for the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Galerie Bellint, a famous French art gallery, held her solo exhibitions in 1981 and 1982. In the 1980s, she repeatedly returned to China from Paris to visit relatives and travel. She gained plenty of inspiration when she saw her homeland's natural scenery, visited masterpieces in museums, and returned to purely abstract art. The composition, brushwork and colour palette created by Lalan in the 1980s became more mellow. The painting Untitled we present this time is a perfect representative work of this period.

Calligraphic Dancing Lines: The Beauty of Tension and Relaxation Like a Dragon

The artistic language of calligraphy is an important vocabulary of Lalan's oeuvre. She was well versed in music and dance and endowed the world under her brushes with new forms by perceiving the resonance among different forms of art. In her creation, she often penetrated the spread of colour with fine pencil strokes to guide emotions' ups and downs with lines. In Untitled, she creatively used dense and vigorous charcoal lines throughout the painting, leaving the strongest moving stroke in the centre like a dragon. The overflowing ink lines expand like sound waves, and the soft and soothing watercolour extends in the painting, full of rhythmic beauty. Through artistic expression derived from calligraphy, Lalan made depictions like electric sounds and dance movements with seemingly accidental features, but actually full of the beauty of tension and relaxation, which is fascinating.

Supreme Landscape: Yellow Leaves Like Gold and Red as Brocade

Untitled is different from Lalan's standard blue and grey coloured works, for it is rarely painted with bright warm yellow colour, showing a open and bright space of life. Gossamer red lines interweave and intertwine in Untitled with spiritual guidance, as if presenting the autumn scenery of "Yellow leaves like gold and red as brocade". As for the composition, Lalan gained new knowledge of the layout of the eastern landscape due to her trip to China. She boldly integrated the liubai conception of traditional Chinese painting in this work, presenting a highly condensed abstract landscape image with the unique layout of "a corner of the mountain" invented by Xia Gui, a master of the Southern Song Dynasty. With the gathering and dispersing of the structure, the intense symphony of colours gradually fades into the clouds. The immensity of heaven and earth is left for distant thinking, and the spirit spins and dances in it, whispering for the vastness.

Price estimate:
HKD: 450,000 - 650,000
USD: 57,300 - 82,800

Auction Result:
HKD: 540,000