Enter the Dragon, Bonhams Magazine

This year Bonhams will hold its inaugural auction of contemporary Asian art. On her return from China, Bettina von Hase reports on the new cultural revolution sweeping the country.

The southern city of Guangzhou. China's cradle of manufacture, is a sobering place. Communist state architecture jostles with dingy high-rise buildings that have hanging washing lines, external air-conditioning units and satellite dishes all over them like a rash. The Pearl River, with its muddy brown water,does not live up to its magical name. It is, at first glance, a surprising place to find the country’s most important contemporary art show, the second Guangzhou Triennial, held here recently at the Guangdong Museum Of Art, Co-curated by star curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru, it is the best place to see the latest and newest in Chinese art, in this edition mixed with more established artists and those from the West such as Dan Graham and Rirkrit Tiravanija, who were commissioned to spend time in China.

"We had a strong feeling that it should be ‘glocal’," says Obrist, who has just become co-director of the Serpentine Gallery "That is, the global and local aspects should both be represented."Guangzhou'sfirst triennial. in 2002, launched a whole generation of Chinese contemporary artists onto the world stage, from its strategic point of the Pearl River Delta where fast modernisation in the past two decades has created unprecedented massive urbanisation. From this city to Shenzhen and nearby Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai, the show brought together the sheer diversity of a region and country experiencing an extraordinary cultural renaissance.

The triennial was the third leg of a 10-day tour that included Beijing and Shanghai which I made with a group of collectors to visit contemporary artists' studios. Guangzhou showed us the emergingtalent of an artistic boom that has collectors snapping up works at the global fairs and in China itself My trip was arranged by the London-based Red Mansion Foundation, a non-profit making organisation promoting cultural exchange between China and the UK through contemporary art. Walking around the displays at Guangdong Museum among mainly Chinese Visitors, I was struck by the makeshift atmosphere. a quality expressed by Obrist and a crucial tool Hanru by installing the art in spaces resembling building sites. Scaffolding climbed up walls and wooden planks were positioned on floors. "Richard Hamilton once told me you only remember exhibitions if you invent a display feature," Obrist comments.

He could have been talking about the country as a whole —China ismemorable, with contemporary art as its display feature except that, unlike an exhibition, it is here to stay. Video and photography are omnipresent, as if these two fast media were the ideal tools with which to document the country'sfast pace. All the works we saw in China were an investigation of the individual in a rapidly changing urban environment, with the resulting anxiety and dislocation. This was best encapsulated by a huge sculpture, Beijing Boom Toner,' consumer lifestyle engine, made by the artist collective, Dynamic City Foundation.

It looked like an architect’s maquette, with three integrated video projections, one of which displayed harsh facts about the boom in fluorescent lettering at its base: "5,000 apartments; 10x Manhattan density; 2020 - urban population 70% (currently only 30%); motorisation 500%; oil resources depleted 2020," and so on. In one of the central lobbies, established artists Yan Lei and Ai Weiwei placed a glass disc on top of a gigantic turtle. a fragile table with a mobile phone on top, which disappeared in the course of the day, perhaps symbolic of the fact that very little lasts in the country's transformation sweeping everything underfoot. There were small pockets of poetry: my favourite piece of the show was Guangzhou Tokyo (2005), Chen Shaoxiong’s wall drawing collaboration with Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa, a series of delicate ink paintings that resemble an artistic conversation. Shaoxiong is a man to watch. He also showed a video called Ink City (2005), where he translated photographs into an ink painting, which he then made into video, re-interpreting a traditional craft in a completely innovative way.

The reconnection to their own roots. traditions and techniques is one of the most exciting aspects of all the work. Tradition is not necessarily abandoned. but reinvented with a contemporary twist. Having been Influenced by Western art for a long time. it is as If Chinese artists are finally carving out an identity all their own. and enjoying creative freedom after years of persecution and hardship. Most of the studios we visited were in Beijing, a city fairly vibrating with energy, where 2,000 artists make a living without any state assistance whatsoever The 30 or so we met there and in Shanghai were all In their early forties. the generation who grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 76), when China closed its doors to the West. Among their number were the painters. Shi Xinning, Zeng Fanzhi, Fang Lijun, Yang Shao Bin. Yang Qian and Zhang Xiaogang, the sculptor, Zhan Wang, who recently had a piece in the Hayward Gallery, photographers Xing Danwen, Wang Qingsong and Cang Xin, and dancer Wen Hui, who creates works in collaboration with performance artist, Song Dong, and twenty-something female video artist Cao Fei, whose stage play at Guangzhou was a sensation. And there are other players on the international scene, such as Huang Yan and Qui Zhijie. Other than Cao, who is a different generation, Mao still weaves through their consciousness despite the fact that he died 30 years ago, in 1976. Thirty years on. China has become an economic and financial juggernaut, a global super-power that has 23 per cent of the world's population.

The excitement about China has only increased since Deng Xiaoping's liberalisation in 1992 encouraged contact with the West, followed In 1997 by being awarded the Olympic Games. By 2008, when the games begin, China wants to present its modern face to the world, and contemporary art and architecture is a crucial tool in the Government's hands. It has not taken long for them to figure out that visitors from abroad are impressed by a vibrant art market, confirmed by the increase in auction prices in Hong Kong and Beijing. "The bulk of profits still in antiques - two-thirds antiques, one third contemporary art." says Beijing-based art consultant Meg Maggio of Pekin Fine Arts, with Asian collectors buying in particular.

In the galleries, a really good work costs between US$5,OOO and US$IOO,OOO, with prices doubling every year The artists I talked to were critical about their works reaching auction houses too quickly, they prefer a slow but steady growth to the current frenetic pace. "The output has not necessarily improved with the demand," says Wang Qingsong, 40, one of China’s major art stars, who explores the obsession with logos and brands In his work. He has a current installation called Follow Me in the Oxford Street windows of Selfridges, his first collaboration with a department store. It is one of two Chinese projects at Selfridges - part of the China In London festival. The other artist Song Dong, who is building a city in the lower atrium made entirely out of biscuits and sweets. The Installation is called Eating the City, and when it is completed on 22 February, visitors will be encouraged to eat the work.

I had lunch In Beiling with Wang. who told me that the number of art spaces is mushrooming in the city, and only half-jokingly added, "There are now so many, that artists are complaining there is not enough time to fill them all." But artists are seizing the opportunity denied to them for so long. Shi Xinninq, a 37-year-old former qraphic designer, paints large-scale black and white works from doctored photographs of fictitious meetings between Mao and other famous global figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock and the Beatles. "The image of Mao in my works represents a memory for Chinese people of my generation,” says Shi (the Chinese put the surname first), who has his studio in a former munitions complex called Factory 798. This and Moganshan Lu District in Shanghai are the two must-see places for contemporary art

In the latter. the gallery to visit is called ShanghART, two massive spaces devoted to the best established and emerging artists. Among others, Swiss owner Lorenz Heibling represents film-maker Yang Fudong (famously the first Chinese artist to be represented by New York dealer Marian Goodman); Zhou Tiehai, whose new work is a dazzling re- interpretation of Chinese traditional brush-stroke painting; and new talent Song Tao, 25, who takes photographs of grass and makes large-scale carpets out of them.

"Song says. 'I'm here now and what does my life mean. and how do I live in these new buildings', " says Heibling. "The forty-something generation is completely different. They saw the change, and they get confused by old and new. What they all have in common is that they are highly educated and very good technically." The current situation feels like a moment of transition before lift-off into the stratosphere. Chinese artists are well aware of the fascination with their country's rapid transformation, where building works are on every corner and a Government programme has been scheduled to create 1,000 museums by the year 2015. Whereas once they wanted to leave, they are now determined to stay and document it all.

Bettina von Hase is founder/director of art consultancy Nine AM. She writes for publications such as Art & Auction and The Telegraph Magazine.