The Bus Stop (1983) and The Other Shore (1986) had their productions halted by the Chinese government, with the acclaimed Wild Man (1985) the last work of his to be publicly performed in China.

His prose works tend to be less celebrated in China but are highly regarded elsewhere in Europe and the West, with Soul Mountain singled out in the Nobel Prize announcement.

Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, during wartime China in 1940 (Gao's original paternal ancestral home town is in Taizhou, Jiangsu with his maternal roots from Zhejiang), his family returned to Nanjing with him following the aftermath of World War II.

Gao is known as a pioneer of absurdist drama in China, where Signal Alarm (《絕對信號》, 1982) and Bus Stop (《車站》, 1983) were produced during his term as resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre from 1981 to 1987.

[5] His book Preliminary Explorations Into the Art of Modern Fiction was published in September 1981[6] and reprinted in 1982, by which point several established writers had applauded it.

The part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taipei in 1990 and in English in 2000 by HarperCollins Australia, mixes literary genres and utilizes shifting narrative voices.

His 1989 political drama Fugitives[9] (also translated as Exile), about three people who escape to a disused warehouse after the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, resulted in all his works being banned from performance in China and he was officially deemed persona non grata.

However, one short poem exists that represents a distinctively modern style akin to his other writings: (April 13, 1986, Beijing)[12] Gao is a painter, known especially for his ink and wash painting.

His exhibitions have included: Gao first saw success and gained critical recognition with the publication of his novella Hanye de xingchen 《寒夜的星辰》 (1980; "Stars on a Cold Night").

[7] Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé stated in 1983 that the work gave some coherence to Chinese writers' attempts to understand Western art and literature after World War I, but "reads more like a loose collection of jottings and reflections [...] the only reason that it has become the Bible of Chinese modernists is that there is an absolute paucity of similar material for a non-specialist readership.

[14] His 1985 play Yeren (Wild Man) was favorably received, and according to scholar Gilbert C. F. Fong represented "the pinnacle of the development of experimental drama at the time.

It also gave notice that drama [...] did not have to be guided by the concerns for socialist education or political usefulness, and that interpretive lacunae in any piece of work [...] would enhance artistic effectiveness.

In his article on Gao in the June 2008 issue of Muse, a now-defunct Hong Kong magazine, Leo Ou-fan Lee praises the use of Chinese language in Soul Mountain: 'Whether it works or not, it is a rich fictional language filled with vernacular speeches and elegant 文言 (classical) formulations as well as dialects, thus constituting a "heteroglossic" tapestry of sounds and rhythms that can indeed be read aloud (as Gao himself has done in his public readings).

Jessica Yeung of Hong Kong Baptist University praised the story "Twenty-Five Years Later" (1982), writing that the manipulation of narrative perspectives creates effective humor and irony.

English-language scholars who have written books about Gao's work include Sy Ren Quah, Letizia Fusini, Todd Coulter, Izabella Labedzka, and Mary Mazzilli.

In 2011, President Chang Kuo-En traveled to France to extend an invitation, resulting in Mr. Gao becoming a chair professor at the Graduate Institute of Performing Arts in 2012, where he has been teaching courses for several years.

In 2014, NTNU, in conjunction with the National Palace Museum, co-presented the Taiwanese premiere of the cinematic poem "Requiem for Beauty," alongside the publication of the corresponding art book.