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 end of the Second World War, the pair moved to Paris while, initially, their son Jia-Ling remained in China with his grandparents. The couple embraced the cultural scene in the French capital, running an atelier in Montparnasse and befriending figures such as Alberto Giacometti and Pierre Soulages. Lalan collaborated with her husband on many of his paintings – naming them and advising on choices – while pursuing her music and dance studies, both at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and the American Cultural Centre.

The couple divorced in 1957, and Lalan subsequently married the French sculptor Marcel Van Thienen. Over the following four decades she blended the worlds of painting and music, much like she combined her Chinese roots and her new life in France. Her paintings drew both on Oriental traditions, such as calligraphic motifs and smoky effects, and the gestural techniques of the French Art Informel movement. She choreographed her paintings like her performances – paint pirouettes, slides and sweeps over the canvas. As Jia-Ling explains, the career trajectory – this dance – was fluid and ever changing. And, of course, for him it was indicative of their exhilarating family life.

We are immensely grateful to Jia-Ling Zhao for sharing his memories with us.