Calling for a New Renaissance

Includes 50 images, with a large number of paintings from Gao Xingjian's private collection.

Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 for a body of literary works originally written and published in Chinese and later translated and published in English, French, and Swedish. Gao's plays have been performed in even more languages on the stages of Asia, Europe, United States, Africa, and Australia. He is also recognized as a painter of international significance; in 2015 his six-panel work The Awakening of the Consciousness became the sole permanent display of a designated room in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. His extraordinary creative achievements draw on his innate talents but also on his profound knowledge and understanding of the creative arts of China and the West.

Born 1940 in China, Gao Xingjian graduated from the Foreign Languages Institute (now renamed Beijing Foreign Studies University) with a major in French and then lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. He became a celebrity playwright and literary critic during the early 1980s until the Chinese authorities banned his works. In 1987 he traveled to Europe and by early 1988 settled in Paris, where he began to write and to paint. Today most of his major writings have been published in different languages and his plays continue to be staged all over the world. In addition, there have been ninety solo exhibitions of his Chinese ink paintings that have been held in Asia, Europe, and the United States, and some fifty books have been published on his art.

In Calling for a New Renaissance, Gao presents his primary concerns of the past decade or so. He indicts the lingering impact of ideology on contemporary literature and art, and for this reason calls for "a new Renaissance," a result of which would be "boundary-crossing creations" such as the three cine-poems that he produced and describes in detail in this book. Of importance in this book, and not documented elsewhere, Gao offers his insights on how, despite receiving his education in the People's Republic of China, he succeeded in educating himself in both Chinese and world literatures because of his love of reading and his disciplined approach to reading. This book also includes fifty images selected by Gao, forty-five of which are his favorite paintings from his private collection.

Calling for a New Renaissance is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in Gao Xingjian, transcultural studies, transdisciplinary studies, and transmedia studies.

See also Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation by Gao Xingjian and Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics edited by Mabel Lee and Liu Jianmei.