Talking with Gao Xingjian in Brussels

Talking with Gao Xingjian in Brussels
By Trevor Carolan
(Translation, Perrine Angly)
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In 2000, Gao Xingjian, author of the acclaimed  Soul Mountain, became the first Chinese
writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was a stormy accolade. During the
nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, Gao spent five years in a Maoist political re-education
camp, and in 1989 was received in France as a  political refugee.  The implications of
awarding the Nobel laureateship to a Chinese exile living in Paris were a clear rebuke to
China‟s ambitions toward international cultural legitimacy, a demonstration of global
misgivings at Beijing‟s failure to come  to terms with its totalitarian view of human rights
after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989.
Gao took it all in stride.  Born at Ganzhou in eastern Jiangxi province in 1940, he was
raised in a family sympathetic to Western idea. His father, a banking official, enjoyed
classical Chinese ink-brush painting, and his Christian-educated mother worked with local
theatre productions.  As Gao remarked during his Nobel Acceptance Speech, his mother also
encouraged him as an 8-year old in a daily writing practice.  As a result, from boyhood Gao
showed an interest in a variety of expressive forms, and literature, painting and theatre have
been essential components of his work as a mature artist.
      Gao specialized in French at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Upon graduating in
1962, he began translating works of French into Chinese, including plays by Beckett and
Ionesco.  His own later writing for the Theatre of Popular Art in Beijing, which produced a
series of his performance works during the 1980s, shows the  influence of the European
absurdist perspectives he absorbed during his early period; they would also bring him severe
chastisement by communist party officials.
      With advent of the Cultural Revolution, Gao joined the Red Guards in their work of
rocking the pillars of Chinese civilization from 1966-76.  Ideological purity proved to be a
shape-shifting creature in those times, however, and he served a five year term of re-
                                              
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The views in The Culture Mandala are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, position or
policies of the Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies. Bearing in mind the controversial debates
now occurring in International Relations and East-West studies, the editors endeavour to publish a range of
diverse, critical and dissenting views.Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, September-December
2010, pp.1-6  Copyright © 2010 Trevor Carolan
education through manual labour after being sent “down to the country”, a period  he
describes in  One Man’s Bible, the work of autobiographical fiction which followed  Soul
Mountain.  To avoid further degrees of persecution, like numberless others at one point he
burned important personal effects including his early manuscripts, for as he related to the
Nobel Committee, “to write even in secret was to risk one‟s life.”  
       When new political winds followed the demise of the Gang of Four, Gao was
permitted to travel outside China and in 1979 visited cultural centres in France and Italy.  On
his return to Beijing, he wrote prolifically. His works included plays and performance works,
short stories, essays, as well as books on modernism in fiction, theatre and the arts.   It did not
take long for censors and critics alike to note anti-state undertones in his writing.
      1982 brought trauma.  He was mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer, a disease, he
has observed, that killed his father.  A year later, faithful to the old Stalinist-Maoist canard
that art should serve Socialist Realism, party authorities accused him of spreading “spiritual
pollution” through his work.  His reaction was the archetypal East Asian artist‟s response to
official censure: he left town and hit the road, wandering for 10 months along the course of
the mighty Yantgze River.  En route he wrote down his observations and reflections, making
notes and sketches of his open-ended journey—the material from which he would eventually
carpenter Soul Mountain.
      Soul Mountain is composed of 81 chapters, equal to those of Lao Tzu‟s brief epistles
in the Tao Te Ching, China‟s 2,400 year old Taoist compendium of life, morals and survival
strategies.   Richard Eder, one of the more compassionate reviewers in U.S. popular media,
commented in the New York Times how the novel is
            an often bewildering and considerably uneven congeries of forms:
vignettes, travel writing, ethnographic jottings, daydreams, nightmares,
recollections, conversations, lists of dynasties and archaeological
artefacts, erotic encounters, legends, current history, folklore, political,
social and ecological commentary, philosophical epigrams, vivid
poetical evocation and much else.
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In brief, Gao‟s style is to give shape to the flotsam and jetsam of a life spent on the bubble of
a chaotic watercourse, to the Tao of disintegration with moments of reflection, small
glimpses of joy amid the chaos.    
                                              
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Richard Eder, “A Dreamlike Chinese Journey Haunted by Past and Present”.  New York Times, Dec. 18, 2000.Culture Mandala: Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural & Economic Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 1, September-December
2010, pp.1-6  Copyright © 2010 Trevor Carolan
      Meantime, the blues fell like rain on Gao.  In 1986 his play  The Other Shore was
banned outright and productions of his other works were prohibited.   Then, with the bloody
repression of the  Tiananmen Square massacre in June, 1989 he renounced his Communist
Party membership and sought political asylum in France.  He was accorded full citizenship in
1998.
      In exile near Paris and writing in both French and Chinese, he supported himself
chiefly by painting.  Working with the traditional Chinese medium of ink and rice paper, his
personal style has been to update the technique by mounting the paper on canvas and other
surfaces as a support.  The immediacy of the eclectic Chinese process admits no correction.
With no revolution in materials since the days of Ma Yuen, it is the existential subject terrain
that makes Gao‟s work unique.   Emblematic of the Chinese proverb „Every poem a painting,
every picture a poem,” his paintings address solitary figures before a nameless landscape,
brooding compositions that juxtapose half-tones of light and dark.   They are compelling
works:  he has exhibited in France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal,
Switzerland, Belgium, in New York and Taiwan.  
      In bestowing the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy attributed it to Gao‟s “œuvre of
universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the
Chinese novel and drama.”  His writing, they added, “is born anew from the struggle of the
individual to survive the history of the masses. He is a perspicacious sceptic who makes no
claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.”
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     At the invitation of French artist Perrine Angly, I spoke with Gao Xingjian at the Jeanne
Bastien Gallery on rue de la Madeleine in the central arts district of Brussels.  From time to
time, Mme. Bastien brought purchasers of Gao‟s work to meet him. Gao sat in an easy-chair
beneath an epigraph from his The Aesthetic of the Artist, painted in black on the wall behind
him. It read:
L’image artistique, aussi simples quie soient ses
propres formes,est supérieure aux motes
[The artistic image, simple though it may be,
its own forms, always surpasses words.