ASCII art is all about recreating pictures using just text. The ASCII protocol is limited to a small set of western characters and symbols. Unicode, defined by the UTF-8 standard can support a much wider range of text symbols, including Chinese and Japanese characters, the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and much more.

@mrejfox represented in monochrome chinese characters

@srhnhm being represented by various unicode characters

@d3visualization in chinese utf8 art

You can play with the scales used to translate the pixel colors to Chinese characters in the following interactive example:

You can also play with the code.