The New Era of Chinese Graffiti: Illegal Tag Bombing, Ancient Chinese Symbols and Chinese Calligraphy

Graffiti art (tuya yishu 涂鸦艺术) appeared in mainland China in the mid-1990s but only gained visibility in major cities in the early 2000s. The late emergence of this movement, already shaped by post-graffiti experiments, resulted in a hybrid form of expression distinct from its Euro-American counterparts. While Chinese graffiti initially drew heavily from Western models, local artists soon began to explore “Chineseness,” integrating national cultural traditions into their work. Crews and individual writers reinterpreted Chinese characters and motifs from calligraphy, classical painting, Buddhist iconography, and Daoist philosophy, thus developing a “Chinese-style graffiti” (Zhongguo tese de tuya yishu 中国特色的涂鸦艺术). Within this framework, this paper investigates the “New Era of Chinese Graffiti” (2020–present) from artistic and stylistic perspectives, focusing on two representative case-studies: the Yellow Peril crew and the writer Dohak625. Despite their different origins, both maintain “old school” graffiti practices through illegal tagging and anti-style aesthetics while incorporating elements of Chinese artistic heritage. The study consists of three sections: an introduction to the development of Chinese graffiti, an analysis of the “New Era” and its key figures, and a final discussion situating this recent phase within the broader evolution of global graffiti culture.