Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

assigned him the task of keeping a diary instead of doing regular textbook homework. As a child he joined patriotic drama performances, and he also often saw traditional Chinese opera performances. At home he enjoyed playing the violin and listening to Western classical music, and being a precocious reader he combed through the family library reading anything that interested him, including books written for adult readers. The family library also contained many publications (some in Chinese translation) on European art and literature; he became infatuated with the brilliant colours of the European masters and began to save his pocket money to buy tubes of oils for his own paintings.

By the time he was a young teenager, Gao Xingjian already had aspirations to become an artist, and he began formal training in oil painting to enhance his chances of being admitted to an art college. However, with the passage of a few more years, the prospect of painting propaganda posters for life led him to enrol instead at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. He graduated with a five-year major in French literature in 1962 and was assigned work as an editor and translator at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. As an undergraduate he read a shelf of books each week from the library collection of French literature, as well as French translations of world literature, while at the very same time censors all over the country were removing Chinese-language writings from library shelves and replacing them with books to educate the population on how to think and behave in China’s new revolutionary society. Gao’s reading ignited in him a strong impulse to write, even though he had to hide all of his writings because they did not conform to the established guidelines. At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution he burned a suitcase of unpublished manuscripts rather than see his “politically incorrect” writings discovered by marauding Red Guards and used as criminal evidence against him. During the Cultural Revolution, after fleeing for his life from a May Seventh Cadre School, Gao spent a number of years in a remote mountain village, working first as a peasant and then as the village teacher. He continued to write in secret, but only after designing ingenious strategies that would allow him to hide at