GAO XINGJIAN

Playwright

Gao Xingjian was targeted in in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as an intellectual and creative. Born in 1940 to an actress and a bank clerk, he was encouraged to study oil painting, sketching, and ink wash painting during his middle school years and later moved on to Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1957. Upon graduating he was sent to a reeducation camp where he spent years doing hard labor and burnt a suitcase full of manuscripts to avoid repercussions from the government. It wasn’t until after the Cultural Revolution ended that he was allowed to travel and began publishing works. He became the resident playwright for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1980 and while traveling to France he was influenced by Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett from whom he developed ideas about avant garde and absurdist theatre. The Other Shore was published in 1987 but banned from production in China during rehearsals for themes deemed controversial by the government such as toying with the distinction between individualism and collectivism. Frustrated with the censorship he faced and threatened by a false diagnosis of lung cancer, Gao embarked on a ten month trek along the Yangtze River during which time he wrote Soul Mountain, an autobiographical and fictional spiritual journey about looking for the fabled mountain ‘Lingshan’. After a self-induced exile and obtaining French citizenship in 1988, Gao returned to direct The Other Shore in Taiwan in 1990 and in Hong Kong in 1995. In 1992 he was awarded the Chevalier l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 for “an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity".