Hot Properties; Edgy, hip and still relatively cheap, contemporary Chinese art is in high demand from Hong Kong to New York.(Cover story)

Byline: Peter Plagens

For the past few weeks, the smooth, ghostly and haunting face of Zhang Xiaogang's "Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120" (1998) has been almost as ubiquitous in contemporary-art circles as, say, an Andy Warhol "Marilyn" or a Damien Hirst pickled shark. Gracing the cover of the catalog for Sotheby's recent New York auction of contemporary Asian art, the discreetly blemished portrait of a young party functionary in a Mao suit also found its way onto the pages of practically every periodical that so much as mentioned the sale. Which, by the way, raked in $13.2 million (against a presale estimate of $8 million). "Comrade No. 120" brought the gavel down at just under $1 million, more than three times the auctioneer's estimate. These sales are the latest proof that Chinese contemporary art is hot, hot, hot, and the latest must-have accessory for the cutting-edge elite.

Why? Partly it's a function of China's growing liberalization, which has allowed visual artists in particular greater freedom of expression. "Artists are pretty much given carte blanche to do what they like; the written word is more controlled," says Chang Tsong Zung, owner of the Hanart Gallery in Hong Kong, a city now considered an essential "third leg" of the contemporary-art world, after New York and London. The work itself is graphically bold and finely executed; many of the artists have been superbly trained in draftsmanship. Others have plunged into video installations and similarly nontraditional forms of work, which get a lot of play in today's art world. In fact, some Chinese artists push the envelope a bit beyond what's tolerated in the West. "Ruan" by Xiao You, for example, consists of the head of a real human fetus with sewn-on rabbit eyes and the body of a bird. While not all Chinese artists go that far, they are valued as "the main commentators on the state of contemporary China," says Chang.

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