Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics

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When Gao Xingjian was proclaimed Nobel Laureate of Literature in 2000, it drew attention to his significant body of literary works that included a collection of short stories, titled Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather (1989), two autobiographical novels titled Soul Mountain (1990) and One Man's Bible (1999), as well as seventeen plays, three of which when performed in Beijing in the early 1980s, had turned him into an instant celebrity, not just in China, but internationally. His plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), and Wild Man (1986) were well known in the English- speaking world soon after their publication in Chinese. However, when his next play, The Other Shore (1986), was banned after a few rehearsals, he relocated to Paris in 1987. His play Escape (1990) about the 4 June 1989 military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulted in a "virtual ban" on his writings, which could no longer be published, sold, or performed in the People's Republic of China. This meant that both the author and his works had been airbrushed out of existence, and that Gao Xingjian research would find it impossible to take root in China. Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics demonstrates the extensive reach of Gao Xingjian's transcultural, transdisciplinary and transmedia explorations. Showcased here is the panoramic aesthetics of a polymath who has successfully personified modern-time renaissance by projecting the struggles of the individual's inner landscape into vivid images on stage, film, black-and-white paintings, and in the multilayered narrative expressions of fiction and poetry, even dance and music, to evoke a sense of sincerity and authenticity that penetrates a viewer/reader's heart. The volume is divided into four parts: philosophical inquiry; transdiscipline, transgenre, transculture; cine-poems with paintings, dance and music; and identifying and defining the self. The chapters probe different aspects of Gao Xingjian's work, bearing testimony to their diverse specializations