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.
