China's Glasnost; The country's communist leaders are beginning to embrace the avant-garde art and literature they once considered taboo.(Cover Story)

Byline: Melinda Liu (With Craig Simons and Jen Lin-Liu)

A decade ago avant-garde photographer Rong Rong lived in a ramshackle farmhouse and took odd jobs to support himself. "No one was interested in buying my work," he recalls. On the contrary: once when he was photographing performance artist Zhang Huan, who had stripped naked, covered himself with honey and then sat for an hour in a Beijing public toilet while flies landed on him, a villager stumbled upon the shoot and called the authorities.

Today the arresting images created by Rong and his Japanese wife, Inri, also a photographer, get a much better reception. They sell for more than $10,000 each, ...