Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul

(Hardback)

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Universally known as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian is also an artist whose work is exhibited all over the world. Born in China in 1940, Gao Xingjian was introduced to the arts as a boy by his mother who was an actress. He worked as a translator while painting and writing, becoming well-known in Beijing for his avant-garde plays. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a re-education camp for the radical views expressed in his theatre. After the events of Tiananmen Square, he left China for France. Today he lives in Paris and works as a painter, critic, playwright and opera librettist. This stunning book showcases for the first time two decades of Gao Xingjian's uvre. In his brilliant and instructive text, Daniel Bergez demonstrates how Chinese Daoism, the Chinese literati painting tradition, Western minimalism and Modernism find echoes in Gao Xingjian's masterful ink-wash paintings. Drawing from Soul Mountain and interviews with the artist, Bergez offers telling insights into these stunning enigmatic paintings, guiding viewers to form their own interpretation of the works. His best-selling novels are Soul Mountain (1995) and One Man's Bible (2000). Aesthetics and Creation, his main work on art and literary creativity, was published in English in 2012.

Reviews

"[Gao] has been both lauded and criticised internationally for the complicated, elusive and labyrinthine structure of Soul Mountain, which eschews a traditional plot for a series of personal, evocative ruminations. . . . His paintings, though deep, are burdened by no such convolutions. Their beauty lies in their intense simplicity. His works (always black ink on paper and, later, canvas) blend the abstract and the literal in remarkable, decisive ways. Images are fluid and interpretation is open, like a Rorschach. Is that a tree A telephone pole A bleeding wound . . . Collected, the images are nothing short of astonishing."--Madeline Gressel "South China Morning Post"

Author Bio

Sherry Buchanan writes extensively on Vietnamese war art and has been a guest curator of Vietnam War exhibitions at the British Museum and other international venues. Among her other books are Tran Trung Tin: Painting and Poems from Vietnam and Vietnam Behind the Lines