Abstract

The current dataset accompanies the Open Access publication “Defining ‘Chinese Emotional Graffiti’ across Contemporary Chinese-Language Urban Contexts: Emotional Public Writing between Individual Experience and Collective Trauma” (Bisceglia, M. R., & Iezzi, A., 2026, Rivista degli Studi Orientali). It contains excerpts from four interview and interview-related exchanges conducted with three artists (Beer1ne, 2024; Wuchang, 2025; Dohak625, 2023 and 2024). Conducted by M. R. Bisceglia between 2023 and 2025, these materials were used to contextualise the analysed corpus, provide insights into creative practices, circulation strategies, and processes of self-representation, and support the interpretation of recurring themes emerging from the visual and textual analysis. It also includes the preliminary thematic coding and Chinese-character transcriptions of the fifty archived Chinese-language graffiti examples that constituted the preliminary corpus. These materials were documented between 2020 and 2024 by M. R. Bisceglia through publicly accessible online sources and systematically coded through an inductive thematic analysis. The original images are not included in the part of the dataset that can be disseminated in open access. They are retained separately in a closed-access .zip archive as part of the research record. Instead, the dataset provides textual descriptions of the archived images, together with their Chinese-character transcriptions, preliminary thematic coding, and source information. Together, these materials support the qualitative analysis and document the analytical process underlying the identification of the eleven recurring emotional repertoires presented in the accompanying publication.