Spectacles of the Sinograph in Chinese Literary and Art Productions

Abstract

This article ponders writing and art that leverage the written script in Sinitic contexts, specifically where Sinographs are fetishized for creative and/or critical purposes—that is to say, they are turned into a spectacle as well as a method. The article analyzes various “technologies of orthography” pivoting on the Sinograph across three modalities of Sinophone expression: Taiwanese concrete poetry, transnational Chinese text-based art, and ludic mediatizations of the written script. It then speculates on the social psychological meaning of the spectacularized Sinograph as a creative-critical nexus by thinking it through the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, arguing that the Sinograph as a grotesque figure embodies contradictory impulses immanent in the regeneration of Chinese culture by fracturing it from within.