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now tour alongside his art exhibitions, and his third film, Mei de zangli (Requiem for Beauty), is scheduled for completion with a cast of thirty performers in 2013.
For political reasons Gao Xingjian has been airbrushed out of existence in China since the early 1990s; nonetheless, he has succeeded in establishing his credentials as playwright and director, novelist, artist, and filmmaker in the international world. His literary endeavours were most significantly acknowledged by his winning the 2000 Nobel Prize in literature, and recently his multidisciplinary achievements were acknowledged in 2008 in a citation presented at Italy’s La Milanesiana in the presence of other distinguished Nobel laureate guests of honour, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, and Elie Wiesel. His achievements are driven by strong creative impulses and a powerful intellect; informed by a profound understanding of literary and art traditions and practices of both China and Europe, Gao defines and actualises a unique aesthetics that lies on a trajectory located between the two.
Creative endeavours derive from the aesthetic actualisation of an individual’s psychic reality. Bestowed at birth in the form of intelligence, creative talent, curiosity, and imagination, as well as emotional tendencies and personality traits, psychic reality is not static and develops as a result of external stimuli in the form of life experiences. These also include education and the insights that emerge continuously from that background, as well as from exposure to various forms of aesthetic creation, such as music, poetry, fiction, essays, theatre, and the visual arts, which can also induce thinking and deep reflection. From scattered references throughout Gao Xingjian’s autobiographical novel, One Man’s Bible, it is possible to ascertain that he had access to many experiences that nurtured his inherited creative propensities within both a Chinese and a European context. He grew up in a middle-class cosmopolitan background in republican China during the Japanese invasion, and because he was a sickly child, his mother took responsibility for his early education. He learned to read and write so quickly that his mother