Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian, born in 1940, Chinese-born writer and artist, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature. Gao’s novels and plays have won critical acclaim but have been banned in his native China for violating cultural restrictions there. He is the first Chinese-born writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Gao was born in Ganzhou, a city in Jiangxi province in southeastern China. His mother, an actress, exposed him to theater and the arts while he was still a child. Gao earned a degree in French literature and language from a college in Beijing in 1962 and then worked as a translator and critic. In 1966 the Cultural Revolution began in China, and Gao was one of many artists and intellectuals who were sent to “reeducation” camps to perform manual labor. During this time he was compelled to burn a whole suitcase full of his writings.

The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, but Gao was unable to publish any of his work until 1979. In 1981 he published Xian dai xiao shuo ji qiao chutan (A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction), a book of essays. Combining experimental forms with traditional Chinese styles, Gao attracted notice as a playwright with Juedui xinhao (1982; Alarm Signal, 1996), which was produced in Beijing’s Theatre of Popular Art. His 1983 absurdist play Chezan (The Bus Stop, 1996) was very popular but drew the wrath of Chinese government ministers, who shut the production down after a few weeks as part of their campaign against “intellectual pollution.” Gao’s play Bi’an (1990; The Other Side, 1997) was also banned in China. Harassed by the government, he left the country a year later and settled in France.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Gao renounced his membership in China’s Communist Party. The bloody confrontation became the backdrop for his play Taowong (1992; Fugitives, 1993), a work that led Chinese officials to ban all of his writings in his native country. In 1990 Gao published the novel Ling Shan (Soul Mountain, 2000). Partly inspired by a ten-month walking tour of the Yangtze River that Gao had undertaken in the early 1980s, the novel features different narrators wandering through rural Chinese villages and among the peasants in an episodic search for meaning in life. The Nobel Committee emphasized Soul Mountain in its citation, calling it “a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego.”

Other works by Gao include the plays Shengsijie (1993; Between Life and Death, 1999) and Zhoumou sichongzou (1996; Weekend Quartet, 1999); and the autobiographical novel Yige ren de shengjing (One Man’s Bible, 1999), which grapples with the trials and aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Also a painter who has illustrated his own book covers, Gao writes primarily in Chinese but also in French. He became a French citizen in the late 1990s.