At the same time, writers remained freer to write in unconventional styles and to treat sensitive subject matter. A spirit of literary experimentation flourished in the second half of the 1980s. Fiction writers such as Wang Meng (王蒙), Zhang Xinxin (張辛欣), and Zong Pu (宗璞) and dramatists such as Gao Xingjian (高行健) experimented with modernist language and narrative modes. Another group of writers—collectively said to constitute the Roots (尋根) movement—including Han Shaogong (韓少功), Mo Yan, Ah Cheng (阿城), and Jia Pingwa (賈平凹) sought to reconnect literature and culture to Chinese traditions, from which a century of modernization and cultural and political iconoclasm had severed them. Other writers (e.g., Yu Hua (余華), Ge Fei (格非), Su Tong (蘇童) experimented in a more avant-garde (先鋒) mode of writing that was daring in form and language and showed a complete loss of faith in ideals of any sort.