A herdsman living on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in Qinghai province falls from a mountain while trying to save a yak. His 12-year-old daughter, Gexiangjiu, sets out to find a doctor and meets Mado, a hearing and speech-impaired boy of the same age who comes from a long line of thangka painters.
Trained by a renowned master, Mado believes his art can save Gexiangjiu's father. Convinced that the man will live as long as he keeps painting, he begins creating a thangka. But an unexpected incident interrupts his work, and the two children's lives take different paths. Mado gives up thangka painting for a decade, while Gexiangjiu, inspired by him, studies art at an academy. Thirteen years later, they meet again.
This is the latest novel The Thangka Painter by writer, screenwriter and film director Dai Sijie, who has lived and worked in France for decades.
The novel began to take shape in 2018 or 2019, when Dai returned to his hometown of Chengdu, Sichuan province, to care for his seriously ill mother. During a quiet moment by her bedside, a sentence came to him almost instinctively: "Aba (father in Tibetan) is dying, firelight flickering on the bandages wrapped around his head."
Before returning to Chengdu, Dai had just completed a French novel featuring an elderly thangka painter.
Thangka refers to traditional Tibetan Buddhist scroll paintings made with natural mineral pigments on fabric. It's popular in areas such as the Xizang autonomous region and Qinghai province. Created according to strict iconographic conventions, they depict Buddhist figures and stories and serve as important objects of worship. Recognized as an intangible cultural heritage, thangka painting embodies the faith, artistic traditions and cultural wisdom of the Tibetan ethnic people.
"Perhaps it's the 'previous-work syndrome' that brought Xizang to mind as I sat by my mother's sickbed," Dai writes in the postscript of the novel.
From that single sentence grew a story about miracles. At its heart is a young thangka painter who believes that as long as he continues painting, the dying father will remain alive.
Dai describes writing the novel as "a spiritual practice". For him, both thangka painting and fiction represent a life force that resists time and pushes back against death.
"I wrote about two young people who paint tirelessly, hoping their art can save those they love. Deep down, it reflected my own longing for a miracle. Sadly, when the book was published in 2022, my mother had already passed away," Dai said at a book event in Beijing in early July.
