The Battle between Simplified and Traditional: Chinese Text-based Interactive Installations and French Lettrism

Abstract

This paper will discuss several Chinese text-based interactive installations from Taiwan and Hong Kong which reflect the anxiety about facing the growing influence of Simplified Chinese and the cultural power from Mainland China. As a logosyllabic script, Chinese is structurally distinctive from alphabetical scripts. However, the ideas of French Lettrism on creating art through deconstructing languages to its smallest particles and using them as objects for a new form of aesthetics and social-political struggle has similarities with some Chinese text-based interactive arts of recent years. This paper will discuss how the ideas from Lettrism can be applied to artistic creations and to analyze Chinese text-based interactive works, so as to examine the specificity of Chinese-based works and the ways they handle the topics of China’s cultural expansion.