Return to Painting

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Summary: Reinventing the Renaisance Man with Gao Xingjian.
Review: Chances are if you've found you're way to this obscure page, in the dusty corners of Amazon's towering collections, then you are already familiar with the stormy melancholic work of Gao Xingjian. He was the darkhorse candidate who came out of nowhere to become China's first Literary Nobel Laurate, and the leading figure in avant-garde Chinese ink painting.

This book vitaly chronicles the later. Although many of his literary works have been translated into English (notably Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible) there is still a great volume of his work that is yet to be presented to American audiences out side of New York, LA, San Francisco, or Seattle. He is best known in China as a playwrite and art critic as well as for his intense paintings executed in the traditonal Chinese medium of black and white ink.

In this aspect he is a phenomenal innovator. He uses traditional mediums and techniques in abstract and disonant ways. The effect of his ink paintings is alternately jarring, serene, fearsome, lonely, jagged and placid. They are the perfect visual complement for his meandering yet meaningfull literary works. Infact, the Taiwanese editions of his books (they aren't published in the PRC for political reasons) include several examples of his paintings to set the tone.

As I lived in the People's Republic of China over the last year, I found that visualy and literarily, Gao Xingjian captures the intensely varried mournfull extacies of life in Modern China, but his passion, regret, exhaltation and dispar are emotions that people of all countries can relate to.

To reinvent your understaing of modern art, buy this book.