Gao Xingjian

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Gao.
Gao Xingjian
Born January 4, 1940 (1940-01-04) (age 71)
Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China
Occupation novelist, playwright, critic, translator, screenwriter, director, painter
Citizenship China
France (since 1997)
Alma mater Beijing Foreign Studies University
Period since 1982
Notable award(s) Nobel Prize in Literature
2000

Gao Xingjian (Chinese: 高行健; pinyin: Gāo Xíngjiàn; Wade–Giles: Kao Hsing-chien, pronounced [kɑ́ʊ ɕǐŋtɕjɛ̂n]; born January 4, 1940) is a Chinese-born novelist, playwright, critic, and painter. An émigré to France since 1987, Gao was granted French citizenship in 1997. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.

Contents

Life

Gao's original home town is . Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, China, Gao has been a French citizen since 1997. In 1992 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Early years in Jiangxi and Jiangsu

Gao's father was a clerk in the Bank of China, and his mother was a member of the Young Men's Christian Association. 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 lots of literature translated from the West, and he studied sketching, ink and wash painting, oil painting and clay sculpture under the guidance of painter Yun Zongying (simplified Chinese: 郓宗嬴; traditional Chinese: 鄆宗嬴; pinyin: Yùn Zōngyíng).

In 1950, his family moved to Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu Province. In 1952, Gao entered the Nanjing Number 10 Middle School (南京市 第十 中学; later renamed Jinling High School (zh:金陵中学) which was the Middle School attached to Nanjing University.

Years in Beijing and Anhui

In 1957 Gao graduated, and listening to his mother's advice, chose Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU, 北京外国语大学) instead of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (中央美术学院), although he was thought to be talented in art.

In 1962 Gao graduated from the Department of French, BFSU, and then entered the Chinese International Bookstore (中国国际书店), where he became a professional translator. During the 1970s, because of the Down to the Countryside Movement, he went to and stayed in the countryside and did farm labour in Anhui Province. He taught as a Chinese teacher in Gangkou Middle School (港口中学), Ningguo Xian (宁国县), 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 Construction in China (《中国建设》).

In 1977 Gao worked for the Committee of Foreign Relationship, Chinese Association of Writers (中国作家协会对外联络委员会). In May 1979, he visited Paris with Chinese writers including Ba Jin (巴金), and served as a French-Chinese translator in the group. In 1980, Gao became a screenwriter and playwright for the Beijing People's Art Theatre (北京人民艺术剧院).

Gao is known as a pioneer of absurdist drama in China, where Signal Alarm (《绝对信号》, 1982) and Bus Stop (《车站》, 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. His other plays, The Primitive (1985) and The Other Shore (《彼岸》, 1986), all openly criticised the state government.

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 (《灵山》). The part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taiwan in 1989, mixes literary genres and 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.

Years in Europe and Paris

By 1987, Gao had shifted to Bagnolet, a city adjacent to Paris, France. The political Fugitives (1989), which makes reference to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, resulted in all his works being banned from performance in China.

Works

Selected works:

Dramas and performances

Fiction

Poem

While being forced to work as a peasant - a form of 'education' under the Cultural Revolution - in the 1970s, Gao Xingjian produced many plays, short stories, poems and critical pieces that he had eventually to burn to avoid the consequences of his dissident literature being discovered.[1] Of the work he produced subsequently, he published no collections of poetry, being known more widely for his drama, fiction and essays. However, one short poem exists that represents a distinctively modern style akin to his other writings:

天葬台
宰了 / 割了 / 烂捣碎了 / 燃一柱香 / 打一声呼哨 / 来了 / 就去了 / 来去都干干净净
Sky Burial
Cut / Scalped / Pounded into pieces / Light an incense / Blow the whistle / Come / Gone / Out and out

(13 April 1986, Beijing)[2]

Other texts

Paintings

Gao is a renowned painter, especially for his ink and wash painting. His exhibitions have included:

Works in English

Reception

Official response from mainland China

Although the general position by the Chinese media and current government towards Gao is that of silence, the Yangcheng Evening News (《羊城晚报》), a state-run newspaper, in 2001, criticised one of his works. A Chinese columnist called him an "awful writer", and said that the idea of his winning the Nobel Prize was "ludicrous".

During Gao's early years in China, his works were published and his dramas were performed, and he had a large readership and audience. He was considered an "experimental playwright" or an avant-courier. Since the ban of his works and his migration to Europe, he has become less known - or even unknown - in China.

The Premier Zhu Rongji delivered a congratulatory message to Gao when interviewed by the Hong Kong newspaper East Daily (《东方日报》):

Comments from Chinese writers

Gao's work has led to fierce discussion among Chinese writers, both positive and negative.

Many Chinese writers comment that Gao's "Chinoiserie", or translatable works, have opened a new approach for Chinese modern literature to the Swedish Academy, and that his winning the Nobel Prize in its 100th anniversary year is a happy occasion for Chinese literature.

Before 2000, a dozen Chinese writers and scholars already predicted Gao's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, including Hu Yaoheng (Chinese:胡耀恒) [3] Pan Jun (潘军)[4] as early as 1999. Chinese literature (characters, language, etc.) has heavily influenced East Asian literature, and Chinese language elements are widely used in several languages including Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. In addition, with 20th century Japanese writers having already won the Prize, many Chinese writers had predicted before 2000 that soon there would be a Literature winner with a Chinese background.

Honors

Trivia

References

  1. ↑ Mabel Lee, 'Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain' in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal, September, 2003, Accessed 14 August 2007
  2. ↑ Published on the website Ba Huang's Art Studio
  3. ↑ http://culture.163.com/edit/001013/001013_42352.html
  4. ↑ http://news.21cn.com/today/2006/09/14/2973393.shtml

Further reading

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations of Gao Xingjian.

See also

Note on references and citations: Gao is best known in the French and Chinese literary circles, thus one can find many more relevant citations on the Wiki pages in Chinese and French.

Nobel Laureates in Literature

Saul Bellow (1976) · Vicente Aleixandre (1977) · Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) · Odysseas Elytis (1979) · Czesław Miłosz (1980) · Elias Canetti (1981) · Gabriel García Márquez (1982) · William Golding (1983) · Jaroslav Seifert (1984) · Claude Simon (1985) · Wole Soyinka (1986) · Joseph Brodsky (1987) · Naguib Mahfouz (1988) · Camilo José Cela (1989) · Octavio Paz (1990) · Nadine Gordimer (1991) · Derek Walcott (1992) · Toni Morrison (1993) · Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) · Séamus Heaney (1995) · Wisława Szymborska (1996) · Dario Fo (1997) · José Saramago (1998) · Günter Grass (1999) · Gao Xingjian (2000)
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