Novelist finds another medium of expression in ink and canvas

Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul 
by Daniel Bergez
Asia Ink
4 stars

In 2000, Chinese-born artist and émigré Gao Xingjian won fame and a Nobel Prize for Literature for his experimental novel, Soul Mountain, loosely based on his travels in western China and his oppression at the hands of the mainland authorities.

The prize earned him international recognition for his work as a novelist and playwright, but his equally accomplished ink paintings are less known. Now, local publisher Asia Ink has collected more than two decades' worth of Gao's extensive work in a beautiful grey-scale tome, alongside lengthy commentary by French art critic Daniel Bergez.

Born in 1940, Gao was a child of the Cultural Revolution. Like millions, he was "sent down" for re-education to the countryside of Anhui province in 1962. He worked for years as a French translator, and even though he had been writing and painting prolifically since childhood, it was only in 1979 that he wrote professionally, as an official party playwright. He gained a reputation for his absurdist drama. Then, in 1985, an exhibition of his ink paintings was shown at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing.

Gao fled the mainland in 1987 in an act of self-imposed exile following a misdiagnosis of cancer and rumours of his imminent arrest. Since then, he has been both lauded and criticised internationally for the complicated, elusive and labyrinthine structure of Soul Mountain, which eschews a traditional plot for a series of personal, evocative ruminations. The narration is split four ways - between I, You, He and sometimes She - in a contemplative nod to postmodern epistemologies.

His paintings, though deep, are burdened by no such convolutions. Their beauty lies in their intense simplicity. His works (always black ink on paper and, later, canvas) blend the abstract and the literal in remarkable, decisive ways. Images are fluid and interpretation is open, like a Rorschach. Is that a tree? A telephone pole? A bleeding wound? In one work, Mind Sketch, thin conifers seem to leap skywards from a clear, snow-covered hill. In another, a character for "soul" drips down into dark clouds on the page; they, in turn, rain on what looks like a stormy, footprint-strewn beach. Soul Mountain is the title.

Figures lead the eye to other figures. The beauty of the image lies in its mutability. "[The paintings'] creative legitimacy," Bergez writes, "is not drawn from mimesis but from the attention they demand as creations in themselves. The only 'subject' of these paintings appears, at first sight, to be light, how it travels, its source and fragments, played out over and over again in dialogue between black, white, and varying shades of grey."

Collected, the images are nothing short of astonishing. They are featured in chronological order, but, like in Soul Mountain, the effect is more cyclical than linear, returning again and again to variations on emotive themes.