Gao Xingjian: Inner Vision 2023

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the French May Arts Festival, Alisan Fine Arts is honoured to announce its 9th solo exhibition for Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese writer awarded a Nobel Laureate. The French-Chinese author is also a renowned artist and playwright. This is Gao’s first solo exhibition after being awarded the Commander of the Legion of Honour for the second time in January.

Most of the works in this exhibition were created in the last two years and are focused on landscapes. However, Gao’s landscape paintings are different from the typical landscape paintings we mostly see. Gao does not portray the reality and perspective of the scene but pursues the changes of light, shadow, and air with various shades of ink on the rice paper. Therefore, whether it is fog, the moonlight, or the wind, the vision appears misty or hazy. The works constitute Gao’s inner world, echoing his award- winning novel Soul Mountain.

Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in 1940, Gao began painting at the age of eight. Under the tutelage of his father, he studied painting, sculpture, and calligraphy with the intention of enroling at the National Academy of Fine Arts. However, his family persuaded him to study French at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages. After graduation, he worked as a translator whilst continuing to paint and write in Beijing. In 1979, his essays and short stories were first published in literary reviews in mainland China, and in 1981 he published A Preliminary Examination of Modern Fictional Techniques. Though he was officially granted French citizenship in 1998, he became a foremost Chinese émigré novelist and playwright almost immediately after moving to Paris in 1987. In 1992 and 2000 respectively, he was bestowed the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Légion d’Honneur by the French Government and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. In January 2023, he was awarded Le Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur again.

His works have been collected by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA; Musée Guimet, Paris, France; Artothèque de Nantes, Nantes, France; La Ville de Marseille, France; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium; Museo Würth La Rioja, Agoncillo, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden; Nobel Foundation, Sweden; Leibniz Association for Cultural Exchange, Berlin, Germany; Singapore Art Museum; Taipei Museum of History; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong; Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Alisan Fine Arts & Gao Xingjian

The gallery first began representing Gao in 1994, after gallery founder Alice King met him through Poon Yiuming, Chief Editor of the Mingpao Monthly. Since then the gallery has organised eight solo exhibitions for him, with notably one in New York in 2004. The gallery has also organised three exhibitions of Gao’s works in conjunction with Le French May, Encre/Chine: Ink Paintings by Jean Degottex, Gao Xingjian and T’ang Haywen at University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong in 2005, New Works by Gao Xingjian 2007-08 in 2008, and Gao Xingjian: Layers of Light, Ink In Mind in 2016.