Xu Bing’s pseudo Chinese and Sinified English as artistic mediums

This article speculates on the artistic rationale and mediumistic significance of Xu Bing’s pseudo Chinese script and Sinified English script. The former demonstrates that a text does not have to be comprehensible to be functional. The latter is provocative in the sense that it gives an alphabetic language a seemingly pictographic and calligraphic look, and points in the direction of the potential becoming-paratactic of an intrinsically hypotactic language. It may not be a pure coincidence that Xu Bing’s Sinified English emerged in a post-alphabetic age.