Gao Xingjian: Painter of the Soul

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, novelist Gao Xingjian is also an artist whose paintings are exhibited worldwide. Born in China in 1940, the multitalented Gao also excelled equally as a critic and playwright, but when his avant-garde plays were banned, he left China in 1987 and settled in France, where he lives today. A champion of a return to painting as a pure, intuitive form of expression, he remains as free from the diktats of the contemporary art market as he was from Com…