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rehearsals, and the publication of a collection of his short stories was blocked. In Beijing the authorities continued to pursue a vendetta against him, but at the same time his plays began to find audiences in Yugoslavia (1984), England (1987), Hong Kong (1987), and Sweden (1987).
At the end of 1987 Gao relocated to Paris, where he began to work feverishly to recoup the lost decades of his creative life. He found new publishers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and to date he has published a total of seventeen plays, a large number of which have also been published in other languages, including English, French, Swedish, Korean, and Japanese, and have been staged in various countries on five continents. Since 1992 he has personally directed several of his own plays, the most ambitious being his grand opera Bayuexue (2000; tr. Snow in August, 2003), which involved Peking Opera performers, a symphony orchestra, percussionists, and a choir; it was staged in Taipei in 2003 and in Marseille in 2005. Also of note is that he directed the production of his play Quatre quatuors pour un week-end (1998; tr. Weekend Quartet, 1999) at Comédie Français in 2003. Gao has seen the publication of his autobiographical novels, Lingshan (1990; tr. Soul Mountain, 2000) and Yige ren de shengjing (1999; tr. One Man’s Bible, 2002), that of his short-story collection, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (1989; tr. Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 2004), and their publication in French, English, and Swedish, as well as in numerous European and Asian languages, Arabic, and a number of Indian languages. Gao’s artworks have also flourished, and he has held fifty major solo exhibitions throughout Europe and in various cities in Asia and the United States, the most recent being La Fin du Monde (Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, 2007), Between Figurative and Abstract (Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, 2007), Depois do dilúvio (Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Lisbon, 2008), and Gao Xingjian (iPreciation Gallery, Singapore, 2010). His exhibitions have been accompanied by the publication of catalogues. At present he is devoting much of his time to innovative filmmaking, an ambition he harboured since the early 1980s, when he was still in Beijing. His films Ceying huo yingzi (Silhouette/Shadow, 2006) and Honghuang zhi hou (After the Flood, 2008)