Gao Xingjian

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Gao Xingjian (born January 4, 1940) is a Chinese émigré novelist, playwright, and scholar who was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 "for an oeuvre of universal importance, bitter insights, and linguistic ingenuity." He is also a respected translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage producer, and a renowned painter.

Gao was granted French citizenship in 1998. In China, Gao's drama is considered fundamentally absurd in terms and avant-garde.

His prose works tend to be less well known in China, but they are widely known in Europe and the West.

Early life

Born in Ganzhou, Jiangsu, during wartime China (19Gao's ancestral home town is in Taizhou, Jiangsu), his family returned to Nanjing with him following the aftermath of World War II. Since 1998, he has been a French citizen. The French government gave him the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1992.

Gao's father was a clerk in the Bank of China, and his mother was a member of YMCA. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, his mother appeared as a playactress of Anti-Japanese Theatre. As a child, Gao loved painting, writing, and theatre under his mother's influence. He read a lot of translated literature from the West during his middle school years, and he studied drawing, ink and wash painting, oil painting, and clay sculpture under Yun Zongy's direction (simplified Chinese: simplified Chinese: pinyin: Yngyng).

His family immigrated to Nanjing in 1950. Gao was admitted to Nanjing Number 10 Middle School (later renamed Jinling High School), which was the Middle School attached to Nanjing University in 1952.

Gao graduated in 1957 and, following his mother's recommendation, chose Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) rather than the Central Academy of Fine Arts, although he was expected to be a natural artist.

Gao graduated from the Department of French, BFSU's, in 1962, and then worked for the Chinese International Bookstore (). He was arrested as a public intellectual during the 1970s, was sentenced to do hard labor in Anhui Province for six years, thanks to the Down to the Countryside Movement. For a short time, he worked as a Chinese tutor at Gangkou Middle School, Ningo province, Anhui Province. He was allowed to return to Beijing in 1975 and became the group leader of French translation for the publication China Reconstructs. ()

Gao, a writer from 1977, served on the Committee of Foreign Relations, a branch of the Chinese Association of Writers. He and a group of Chinese writers, including Ba Jin, visited Paris in May 1979. Gao was both a screenwriter and playwright for the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1980.

Gao is known as a pioneer of China's absurdist drama, where Signal Alarm (, 1982) and Bus Stop (, 1983) were produced during his tenure as resident playwright at Beijing People's Art Theatre from 1981 to 1987. It gave him a reputation as an avant-garde writer, owing to his European theatrical heroes. The former work (the full name of which has also been translated as Absolute Signal) was described as a breakthrough and trendsetter in Chinese experimental theatre. Preliminary Investigations Into the Art of Modern Fiction was published in September 1981 and reprinted in 1982, at a time when several well-known writers had lauded it. Wild Man (1985) and The Other Shore (1996) both openly criticized the government's state policies. After a month, the singer's rehearsal was called off.

Gao was misdiagnosed with lung cancer in 1986, and he began a 10-month trek along the Yangtze, which culminated in his book Soul Mountain (). Part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taipei in 1990 and in English by HarperCollins Australia in 2000, mixes literary genres and employs shifting narrative voices. "One of those singular literary works whose comparisons seem to be impossible to compare with anything other than themselves," the Swedish Nobel committee has cited it specifically. The book explores his travels from Sichuan province to the coast, as well as life among Chinese minorities such as the Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples on the fringes of Han Chinese history.

Gao had migrated to Bagnolet, a city close to Paris, France, by the 1980s. Fugitives, a 1989 political drama that also translates as Exile), about three people who escaped to a disused warehouse after the tanks marche into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, resulted in all his activities being barred from appearance in China, and he was officially named a non grata.

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