The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Centre of Chinese Studies

Realms of the Spirit in Gao Xingjian’s Literature and Art: A Symposium and Film Showcase of a Nobel Laureate

4 January 2010 is the 70th birthday of Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Literature. To celebrate his birthday, a symposium will be held at SOAS, University of London, featuring a lecture by the author and the screening of three of his films. Mr Gao Xingjian is both a writer and a painter. The symposium will focus on his works and thoughts, and his contribution to fiction, poetry, drama and theatrical art, Chinese ink-painting and film, as well as his theory of art and literature.

Speakers include:

Gao Xingjian, Sinologist Noël Dutrait, Poet Yang Lian, Sinologist Mary Mazzilli, Writer Chen Maiping, Novelist Ma Jian & many more.  

Programme

The symposium will be held in Chinese and English.  

Biographies

Michel Hockx is Professor of Chinese in the University of London. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1994 for a thesis on modern Chinese poetry. He has since published widely in the field of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, focusing on aspects of the organization of the literary field and practices of distribution of literary texts.

Noël Dutrait is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille 1) of Aix-en-Provence.  He specializes in contemporary Chinese literature, and he has translated several works by A Cheng, Han Shaogong, Su Tong, Mo Yan and particularly by Gao Xingjian.

Tienchi Martin-Liao graduated in the Taiwan National University, Tienchi Martin-Liao and came to Germany in the seventies.  As a scholar and author, she worked many years in the Ruhr-University- Bochum, and later she became the head of the Richard-Wihelm Research Center for Translation and the editor-in-chief of the (Chinese-German literature translation) series ARCUS-CHINATEXTE.  She left Germany in 2000 and worked in the Washington DC based Laogai Research Foundation where she starts and serves as editor-in-chief of a biography series of political prisoners in China.  At present, Martin-Liao represents the Laogai Foundation in Europe and is the president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC).

Mary Mazzilli holds a PhD at SOAS (Chinese and Comparative literature) – her thesis is titled Gao Xingjian vs. Martin Crimp in between Modernism and Postmodernism. She has been presenting many papers at several conferences in the UK and in Europe.   Her research interests vary from Chinese Modern Theatre, Gender Studies to Anglo-American literature.  She was a visiting lecturer of English Literature (Women’s writing) at Goldsmith College in 2007/08 and she is now lecturing on Chinese and Taiwanese cinema at SOAS.  She also writes plays (they have been staged in fringe and non-fringe venues across London) and poetry.

Yang Lian, a prize wining Chinese poet, was born in Switzerland, grew up in China and now lives in London.  He published 10 volumes of poetry, 2 volumes of prose as well as 1 volume of essays.  His work has been translated into more 20 languages and he has travelled around the world to give readings and lectures.  His representative works including Where the Sea Stands Still; Concentric Circles; Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections; Lee Valley Poems... etc. His works have been reviewed as "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!'", "one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature" and "one of the great world poets of our era'". Yang Lian has been elected a board member of International PEN in 2008.

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953.  He worked as a watch mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a publicity photographer for a petrochemical plant.  Later he was assigned the job of photojournalist for a state-run magazine.  At the age of thirty, he was targeted in a government campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’.  He gave up this job and travelled for three years across China ­ a journey described in his book Red Dust, winner of the 2002 Thomas Cook Award for Travel Writing.  After the government banned his books in China in 1987, he moved to Hong Kong, and then ten years later to London, where he now lives. He wrote nine books (including novels and collections of short stories and essays), and were published in twelve languages. The Noodle Maker, a dark humorous satire of post-Tiananmen China, was published in English in 2004. In the same year, he awarded one of the 50 most important writers in the world by French literary magazine Lire. Stick Out Your Tongue, a novella based on his travels in Tibet and was published in English in 2006. Beijing Coma was published in English in 2008, winner of the T. R. Fyvel Index on Censorship Award 2009 and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  Beijing Coma has been translated into twenty languages for global publishing.

Further information about Gao Xingjian: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000

Further Information

Contact the Centres & Programmes team on events@soas.ac.uk or Tel: 020 7898 4892/3

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