Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian (高行健 in Chinese; born January 4, 1940) is a Chinese émigré and later French naturalized novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity."

He is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.

Gao's drama is considered to be fundamentally absurdist in nature and avant-garde in his native China.

Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, during wartime China in 1940 (Gao's original paternal ancestral home town is in Taizhou, Jiangsu with his maternal roots from Zhejiang), his family returned to Nanjing with him following the aftermath of World War II.

In 1950, his family moved to Nanjing.

In 1952, Gao entered the Nanjing Number 10 Middle School (later renamed Jinling High School) which was the Middle School attached to Nanjing University.

In 1957 Gao graduated, and, following his mother's advice, chose Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) instead of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, although he was thought to be talented in art.

In 1962 Gao graduated from the Department of French, BFSU, and then he worked for the Chinese International Bookstore (中國國際書店).

During the 1970s, because of the Down to the Countryside Movement, he was persecuted as a public intellectual, forced to destroy his early writings, and was sent to the countryside to do hard labor in Anhui Province for six years.

He taught as a Chinese teacher in Gangkou Middle School, Ningguo county, Anhui Province for a short time.

In 1975, he was allowed to go back to Beijing and became the group leader of French translation for the magazine China Reconstructs (《中國建設》).

In 1977 Gao worked for the Committee of Foreign Relationship, Chinese Association of Writers.

In May 1979, he visited Paris with a group of Chinese writers including Ba Jin.

In 1980, Gao became a screenwriter and playwright for the Beijing People's Art Theatre.

By the late 1980s, Gao had shifted to Bagnolet, a city adjacent to Paris, France.

His book Preliminary Explorations Into the Art of Modern Fiction was published in September 1981 and reprinted in 1982, by which point several established writers had applauded it.

Absolute Signal (1982) was a breakthrough in Chinese experimental theatre.

Gao is known as a pioneer of absurdist drama in China, where Signal Alarm (《絕對信號》, 1982) and Bus Stop (《車站》, 1983) were produced during his term as resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre from 1981 to 1987.

Influenced by European theatrical models, it gained him a reputation as an avant-garde writer.

The production of the former work (the title of which has also been translated as Absolute Signal) was considered a breakthrough and trend-setter in Chinese experimental theatre.

The Bus Stop (1983) and The Other Shore (1986) had their productions halted by the Chinese government, with the acclaimed Wild Man (1985) the last work of his to be publicly performed in China.

His plays Wild Man (1985) and The Other Shore (《彼岸》, 1986) openly criticised the government's state policies.

The rehearsal of the latter was ordered to stop after one month.

In 1986 Gao was misdiagnosed with lung cancer, and he began a 10-month trek along the Yangtze, which resulted in his novel Soul Mountain (《靈山》).

He left the country in 1987 and his plays from The Other Shore onward increasingly centered on universal (rather than Chinese) concerns, but his 1989 play Exile angered both the government for its depiction of China and the overseas democracy movement for its depiction of intellectuals.

Gao's influences include classical Chinese opera, folk culture, and 20th century European drama such as Antonin Artaud, and he said in 1987 that as a writer he could be placed at the meeting point between Western and Eastern cultures.

He is a very private person, however, and later claimed, "No matter whether it is in politics or literature, I do not believe in or belong to any party or school, and this includes nationalism and patriotism."

His prose works tend to be less celebrated in China but are highly regarded elsewhere in Europe and the West, with Soul Mountain singled out in the Nobel Prize announcement.

His 1989 political drama Fugitives (also translated as Exile), about three people who escape to a disused warehouse after the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, resulted in all his works being banned from performance in China and he was officially deemed persona non grata.

Selected works:

The part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taipei in 1990 and in English in 2000 by HarperCollins Australia, mixes literary genres and utilizes shifting narrative voices.

It has been specially cited by the Swedish Nobel committee as "one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves."

The book details his travels from Sichuan province to the coast, and life among Chinese minorities such as the Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples on the fringes of Han Chinese civilization.

In 1992 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Gao's father was a clerk in the Bank of China, and his mother was a member of YMCA.

His mother was once a playactress of Anti-Japanese Theatre during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Under his mother's influence, Gao enjoyed painting, writing and theatre very much when he was a little boy.

During his middle school years, he read much translated literature from the West, and he studied sketching, ink and wash painting, oil painting and clay sculpture under the guidance of painter Yun Zongying.

In 1997, he was granted French citizenship.

He has been a French national since 1997.