Xie Jinglan – popularly and professionally known as Lalan – was a singular woman of numerous talents: a painter of harmonious compositions, a performer of spectacular imagination and, as her son Jia-Ling Zhao recalls, a mother of extraordinary charm and charisma.

Lalan was born in 1921 in Guizhou, a province in south-west China, into an intellectually engaged family – her father was a figure in Chinese literary circles, her grandfather an academic. Music was Lalan’s first love and in the late 1930s she enrolled in the music department at Hangzhou School of Art. It was here that she met Zao Wou-Ki, who would become one of the most prominent Chinese abstract painters of the 20th century. The couple married in 1941.

After the e...