All The Country’s An Art Exhibit

Some of the hottest tickets in China of late were not for the Olympic Games, but for major contemporary-art shows. At the Shanghai Art Museum, crowds queued for up to four hours on the opening Sunday of the city's international Bienniale Sept. 14; some 11,000 people swarmed inside before staff had to halt admission because the museum was too full. Many would-be visitors made do with taking photographs of the works scattered around the park outside, including a decrepit steam locomotive and antique railway carriage, shipped in as part of an installation by artist Jing Shijian.

The somber-looking work symbolized the journey of millions of urban Chinese youth who were transported to the countryside by Chairman Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. It's a subject still rarely open for public discussion in China—and a reminder that contemporary art has, in recent years, been pushing for greater freedom in a society where expression is still often controlled.

Though its theme, "Translocalmotion"—a reference to China's massive rural-to-urban migration—was not particularly original or provocative, many of its works were. Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum's installation featured closed-circuit television cameras trained on the audience, an apparent reference to the surveillance measures in nearby People's Square, seat of the Shanghai government. Jin Shi created a model of the spare, harsh rooms inhabited by many migrant workers. The show's most striking work, a colorful parade of giant steel dinosaur sculptures with grinning human faces—the trademark image of contemporary painter Yue Minjun—could be read as a reflection of Yue's cynicism toward modern society.

The arrival of swarms of foreign curators, critics and collectors underscored what big business Chinese art has become—and why Chinese authorities have backed off. "In the 1980s the government actively combated [contemporary art]; in the '90s they ignored it," says Ulli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China who set up one of the first—and largest—collections of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s. "But now, gradually, they are discovering that it is a financial resource—the world wants Chinese art, so they are slowly getting into it." Pi Li, a curator and art critic who teaches as the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, says the government stopped abruptly shutting down contemporary-art shows around 2000, as it prepared to join the World Trade Organization. "It wanted to prove how much we'd improved on human rights," he says.

The Bienniale was not the only show to come to Shanghai in September (it runs through Nov. 16). The second ShContemporary Art Fair was also in town Sept. 9 through 13; organized by Lorenzo Rudolph, the man originally behind Art Basel, it brought to Shanghai works from 140 contemporary galleries from China and the rest of Asia, as well as Europe and America. A string of other major contemporary-art exhibitions also opened around the country, in public museums—including the Nanjing Biennial and the respected Guangzhou Triennial—as well as in dozens of private galleries.

Few subjects remain off-limits for artists. Though a pair of tattooed pigs was banned from ShContemporary—ostensibly for sanitary reasons—a tattooed man was put on sale, and reportedly sold for $150,000. Other works at ShContemporary included Zhang Peng's sinister photo images of doll-like women performing surgery on a dog, and Osama bin Laden brandishing a rifle as he stands over a female figure with her skirt hiked up. At the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Michael Wolf's stunning photos depicted piles of Chinese-made toys and the factory workers who manufactured them.