Gao Xingjian is a celebrated Chinese-French painter ... who is perhaps more appreciated outside of his native China, Gao was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000.

Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian no longer thinks about China. IT feels very far away,” he says over a crackling phone line from Paris, where he has lived since 1987.

Past Asian winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature include India’s Rabindranath Tagore, Japan’s Yasunari Kawabata and ...