Gao Xingjian’s Escape from Orientalism

Gao Xingjian’s 2000 Nobel Prize win is a commonly cited example of the global literary market’s “technologies of recognition,” where the West acts as an “agent of recognition,” which recognizes the other according to its own standards, while the non-West is an “object of recognition,” that desires to be recognized. Rather than presuming the passivity of Gao’s reproduction of Western cultural dominance, I am more interested in exploring how he actively reconstructs Chinese culture with Orientalist elements. For example, Of Mountains and Seas (1989) and Snow in August (1997) are two plays which Gao completed in France and which appropriates ancient Chinese cultures. With reference to Gao’s “cold” theatrical techniques of suppositionality and tripartite acting I argue that these two plays address feminist and religious limitations in ancient Chinese cultures by strategically appropriating Orientalist stereotypes in their portrayals of the Chinese mythology of Chang E escaping to the moon and Zen Buddhism respectively. Overall, this paper contributes a more nuanced understanding of Gao’s negotiations with Orientalism: Gao’s “escape” from Orientalism is less about the avoidance of Orientalism than a theatrical staging of Orientalism.