Since the 1980s, China has had a group of creative, independent-minded people -- artists, intellectuals, film-makers, musicians -- who have greatly attracted Westerners.
Most of them are based in Beijing. Shanghai and China's other cities do not have such a cultural scene. Meeting with these figures is often exciting and thought provoking. Many are now world famous.
As Beijing's bohemian milieu has grown more commercial over time, the free thinking spirit of yesteryear is harder to find. The creative fountain also seems to have run dry.
But interest around the world continues to grow, with galleries and museums paying increasing attention to Chinese art. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarrantino and musicians like Malcom McLaren come to Beijing as if on an artistic pilgrimage, to be feted by the local artistic community.
Why is Chinese art, broadly defined, so exciting? The answer may have less to do with art and more to do with China. Chinese contemporary art is generally rebellious, and the conflict it presents between a China many people still think of as regimented and Communist, and the art at hand may be what attracts our attention. But most works don't manage to sustain it. The novelty wears itself off quickly.
What we are talking about is a paucity of ideas. While some of the music, art, and film to come out of China has been powerful, I have never been sure it is as powerful in a reference framework that doesn't include China.
Great work stands on its own, irrespective of national origin; it is universal. Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness, a film set in Taiwan after World War Two, is as much about the historic events of the transition from Japanese to Chinese rule as about how people can be the innocent victims of history.
It is a moving film because of that, and the historical details are just a backdrop. Compare Hou's films with those of mainland counterparts like Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige, for example, and the difference is apparent.
Chinese art has been characterised by an oppositionist simplicity: East vs West, the past vs the present, commerce vs culture. China's so-called pop art mixes symbols of Communist authority -- Mao portraits, the Tian'anmen Square, military uniforms -- with symbols of consumer culture: Coca Cola, Nike, McDonald's.
Yu Youhan paints Chairman Mao alongside Whitney Houston. The Luo brothers show a Chinese peasant, hands outstretched, "welcoming the world's famous brands".
Liu Yan juxtaposes long-haired heavy-metal musicians, punk rockers with baseball caps worn backwards, businessmen with sunglasses and cell phones, with characters from traditional Beijing opera.
This is caricature, not art. Andy Warhol's relationship with commercialism was more complex: he made fun of it while embracing it, hence his genius. The other problem with this type of art is that it implicitly attaches moral value to the Maoist past.
No surprise, then, that such art recycles formulas from Communist propaganda. But Chinese artists and film-makers, like Warhol, are adept manipulators of commercialism, as their success demonstrates. In this sense, there is a hypocrisy inherent in their work.
Feng Xiaogang is an exception: a talented film-maker who has embraced modern urban China, but he is looked down upon by his confreres as not being "artistic" enough.
Chinese film-makers may make, as Zhang Yimou has, films supporting authoritarian rule (Hero), they may direct TV commercials, own villas by the Great Wall, or drive SUVs, but they prefer to stand above the commercial world, in theory if not in practice.
China's politically restricted environment has propelled artists into one of two directions: some have chosen to push the limits, and this effort has soon taken them into unchartered territory.
Others have learn to avoid the limits altogether, like director Feng Xiaogang, or they have begun to cross over to the other (government) side, like Zhang Yimou. Either way, it is the limits that have defined their choices.
In other words, art has been driven by a factor outside itself. The situation brings to mind the Stockholm syndrome, in which a prisoner builds an emotional connection with the jailer.
The true challenge of art is freedom -- creation in the absence of, and separate from, limits. Freedom presents the creative mind with the ultimate challenge.
Chinese artists have been disoriented by the gradual release of controls in China. Those seeking to test the limits have had to move beyond testing political limits to testing social and moral conventions.
Masturbation, copulating pigs, dead foetuses, body parts, human blood, animal meat and entrails, and child pornography are all part of this new artistic repertoire. Like the hero of a happening by artist Ma Jian, Chinese artists began to fish in the sewer -- figuratively and literally.
Honey, an installation by Peng Yu, a young woman artist, involves the severed head of an old man and the corpse of a still-born child. Other installations by Peng, concocted with male partner Sun Yuan, involved dead Siamese twins.
Another artist, Zhang Huan, spent two hours naked covered with filth from a septic tank. In a different work, Zhang placed red-hot melting iron around his wrist. San Mao had himself bolted, also naked, in a coffin filled with animal entrails.
The coffin was then broken from the outside; his body, and the animal entrails, burst out onto Beijing's snow-covered ground. Another artist, Zhu Yu, hung a dead person's arm -- bought, like other artistic materiel in China, from a friendly local hospital -- on a hook in an exhibition hall.
On different occasion, Zhu sewed a piece of his own flesh onto the body of a dead pig, aiming to provide it with life.
At a recent exhibition at 798, an "art space" in Beijing, Liu Zheng exhibited "Revolution" -- a series of large-sized colour photographs of reenactments of violent scenes from China's history, including rape scenes with pubic hair and Caesarian scars plainly visible.
I do not accuse this art of bad taste; it is borderline interesting and perhaps original. What bothers me was captured in the words of Octavio Paz: "Modern art is beginning to lose its powers of negation.
For some years now, its rejections have been ritual repetitions: rebellion has turned into procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony.
Negation is no longer creative." Pi Li, a young Beijing critic and curator, has made a similar point. "Chinese artists," he says, "are bent on destruction, on saying 'no.' They can't get themselves to say 'yes.'
In other words, they can only deconstruct power, they cannot manifest the necessary power to construct. We challenge, we attack, we resist, but we don't pro-actively build." There is only so much hardcore avantgarde art one can absorb before one's senses are numbed.
Beijing, unlike Shanghai or the rest of China, has an edge, doubtless because it doubles as the country's political capital. It's a difficult, in-your-face city.
It is not frightening; merely hard and uncompromising, not-pleasant or soothing. The art to come out of Beijing has such an edge, as well.
This edge has been co-opted, and softened, by commercialism but it retains certain raw elements. These raw elements may grow further if social or political conflict arises, in which case the art may seem prescient.
The literary historian C T Hsia once blamed modern Chinese writers for an "obsession with China." This obsession still holds sway today; China is the focus of creators, whether implicitly or explicitly. Going forward, they should be preoccupied less with China and more with humanity. Depth should replace shock value.
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