Gao Xingjian survived turbulent times such as China’s Cultural Revolution and strict censorship. In the 1980s he staged avant-garde plays like “Bus Stop” and “Wild Man,” sparking intense debate at home and abroad. Facing bans and surveillance, he embarked on a ten-month trek through Sichuan’s forests and mountains. That journey fed directly into his novel “Soul Mountain,” whose narrative voice shifts among “I,” “you,” and “she,” drawing readers into the text. In “Fugitives,” written after the 1989 Tiananmen events, he depicts the sharp tension between individuals and state power. He became a French citizen in 1998 and continues to write and paint in both Chinese and French. His body of work opened new channels for modern Chinese literature to converse with an international readership.

Gao Xingjian’s oeuvre can be viewed as an eclectic synthesis of literary modernism, traditional Chinese theatre, and European absurdist drama. His landmark novel “Soul Mountain” employs polyphonic narration and a post-modern fragmentary structure to investigate themes such as self–other relations, reconstruction of memory, and the creation of reality through language, all set against the backdrop of post-Cultural-Revolution China. In his plays he references Brechtian alienation effects and Artaud’s corporeal theatre while fusing Daoist spatial concepts and stylized gestures from Peking opera, staging experimental productions at Beijing’s People’s Art Theatre. Linguistically he moves freely among colloquial Mandarin, regional dialects, and classical poetic cadences, foregrounding both the untranslatability and translatability of Chinese. His post-exile writings stand at the intersection of exile literature and Francophone letters, relativizing nation-state-based conceptions of literature. The Nobel award thus prompted a reassessment of multilingual subjectivity within world literature (Weltliteratur).

Gao’s texts simultaneously activate a mutable subjectivity and metafictional self-reflexivity. In “Soul Mountain,” alternating first- and second-person pronouns disrupt stable focalization, effectively mobilizing Benveniste’s concept of “historical present” alongside Genette’s levels of narrative. His dramaturgy rejects Stanislavskian realism, leaning toward a Grotowskian performative space where voice, silence, and physical void function as sculpted temporal elements. The essay collection “Without Isms” delineates a discursive strategy to sever literary creation from ideology, introducing an internal “othering” into Sinophone letters. His stance constitutes a seminal case for border-crossing literature studies, especially regarding decentered self-translation in the post-global era. Moreover, the intermedial dialogue between his abstract ink paintings and texts can be interpreted as a Sinicized adaptation of Kandinsky’s Gesamtkunstwerk concept.