Artist: Pieter Lategan Title: Chinese Girl 1.0 (Pieter’s Replica of Vladimir Tretchikoff's Kitch and call it Pieter’s Trash.) - 2018
— Pieter Lategan, Pretoria, 19 November 2025
I’ll tell this simply — the way it happened to me.
I had just moved back from Johannesburg to my apartment in Pretoria. It was a very hot day — those Pretoria summers that make everything slow and sticky. I was looking for ideas. I sat with a coffee, flicking through pictures and books, trying to find something that would start a new painting. Then I saw Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl (often called “The Green Lady”), and I laughed out loud.
I laughed because I thought: how can one painting — done by a Russian-born artist who later lived in South Africa in the 1950s — become so famous? How could a face painted in a strange blue-green tone hang in so many homes and be printed so widely? That curiosity was the spark. Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl is usually dated to 1952–53, and its mass-produced prints were among the best-selling art prints of the twentieth century1.
At first I worried: people will call this kitsch. They’ll say I’m copying trash. But then I thought: attention is not a bad thing — maybe people will look, and then learn something, and maybe they’ll ask questions. I didn’t know which audience I would speak to, or where that attention would take me. I only knew I wanted to try.
I started to study Tretchikoff slowly. I chose to work from the art of someone who is dead — not because I wanted to disrespect him, but because it felt freer. When the artist is alive, you never know if they’ll like what you do with their work; that can make things awkward. With a deceased artist I felt I could explore more boldly. Tretchikoff was famous in his day and was often described as enormously wealthy for a painter — once even described as the richest artist in the world after Picasso by some commentators2.
My mother was a journalist and she loved writing. I got that love from her — for telling stories, for putting feelings into words. This blog is part of that: a place where I put down how I feel about my work — as an artist, a fashion designer, and a small businessman trying to keep going in hard times. I don’t know where the blog will go. I only know it helps me understand what I’m doing and who I am trying to speak to.
Painting, Memory, and Inspiration
It was memories like these, and a lifetime in Pretoria, that later drew me to Tretchikoff’s work. The Chinese Girl became more than a painting; it became a doorway into thinking about history, culture, and memory. My first attempt at the painting, oil on canvas, roughly 54 × 60 cm, I called Pieter’s Replica of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Kitch, or Pieter’s Trash. I painted it in 2018, and wrote about it later click here to go to my page on my blog https://pieterlateganart.blogspot.com/2019/.
Here is what I wrote then:
“Tonight I studied low culture, or you can even call it trash art. It is plain trash. It doesn’t fit into mainstream art… I feel it is funny, and I remember I sat late at night just looking at Vladimir Tretchikoff’s paintings. I must say I like it. Actually, I think it is very good. It is South African; it is ours. We own it… She is currently living in my house or apartment. And every day I start seeing meaning in it. But not a deep meaning. I think people need to trash sometimes. People get tired of all the real and mainstream stuff.”
That night in February 2018, the painting was just a canvas. Now, writing this on 19 November 2025, I see how history, memory, and art can merge — from my childhood fears in Silverton, to a Russian-born painter in South Africa in 1953, to how I express myself today as an artist, fashion designer, and citizen of Pretoria.
Photo Google Maps: Silverton Primary School, Pretoria, South Africa June 2017
Childhood, Fear, and the Silverton Siege
Some memories of Pretoria shaped me as much as any painting. I was nine years old in January 1980, in my classroom at Silverton Primary School, when I experienced something terrifying. Around 12:00–1:15 PM, my teacher told us to lie down on the floor. I was confused, worried, and didn’t fully understand what was happening.
Through the fear, I thought about Landman, a girl in my class, whose mother worked as a teller at the Volkskas Bank across the street. At first, I imagined a robbery. Later, as we were moved to the school sports ground, I realised the truth: there were people inside the bank — armed cadres — and this was not just a robbery.
We walked in rows, hundreds of pupils — around 800 of us — along Jasmyn Avenue, carefully moving away from the school grounds. At the corner near the bottom of the school grounds, I saw the bank building and many police cars. Sirens wailed, and the tension was heavy.
That evening, from my home on Isaac Stegeman Street, near the NG Church in Blom Street, I could still hear the sounds of the siege. Around 7:05 PM, there were hard, sharp gunshots from Pretoria Road, where the Volkskas Bank was. The sirens, the noise, and the chaos left me shaken. I went to bed around 8:30 PM, scared and upset, feeling a fear I had never known before — the first time I experienced murder and violence, and a sense that something terribly wrong had happened.
What I didn’t understand then, but know now, is that this was the Silverton Siege, a six-hour hostage situation that became a defining moment in Pretoria’s history. On that day, three MK cadres — Stephen Mafoko, Humphrey Makhubo, and Wilfred Madela — took 25 civilians hostage inside the bank, making demands including the release of Nelson Mandela, cash, and a plane to Maputo3. Negotiations with the police continued for hours until all three cadres were killed, and tragically, two hostages also lost their lives, with many more injured3.
For a nine-year-old, the event was terrifying and incomprehensible. Seeing the police cars, hearing sirens and gunfire, walking in lines with hundreds of classmates — it was the first real encounter I had with the fragility of life, and the sense that the world could be unfair and violent. That night, lying in bed, the weight of fear and the memory of death stayed with me.
The following day, South Africans woke up to shocking and heartbreaking images printed in the newspapers. The media published graphic photos of the blood-soaked banking hall, showing the chaos and the lives lost during the attack.
One of the most unforgettable pictures was of Mrs. Landman, the mother of one of the victims, sitting upright with steel fragments still lodged in her arm, showing exactly where she had been shot. This photograph became one of the most powerful and painful reminders of what had happened inside the bank that day.
Photo: https://www.netflix.com/
Reflections in Today’s World
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Just like the Silverton Siege was tied to history and politics, today I think about the world as I write this. On 19 November 2025, just before the first-ever G20 Summit in Africa, former President Donald Trump announced he would not attend the summit in Johannesburg, citing issues with land policies and treatment of white Afrikaners5. It reminds me that politics, history, and culture are always intertwined — and even art, like Tretchikoff’s or mine, exists inside that context.
Silverton Siege | The World of Silverton Siege “Inspired by True Events” | Netflix - 2022
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