Eastern promise

There was a time when Chinese artists walked on eggshells for fear of offending the old men of power in Beijing. Now here, in the China Pavilion that is part of the Liverpool Biennale Fringe (until 26 November), one artist, Weng Peijun (pronounced Weng Fen), is building installations from eggshells.

His satirical work ‘The Triumphal Arch’ depicts the controversial building of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River, the largest hydroelectric scheme in the world, five times the size of the Hoover Dam. More than a million people are being forcibly relocated; agriculture, fisheries and wildlife are being destroyed.

The installation is made from the most fragile material he could find, eggshells, 20,000 of them: a stunning, ironic metaphor for this act of environmental violence. It demonstrates a new political confidence among Chinese artists. After the repression of the Cultural Revolution, contemporary art is on the move.

In recent years the media have been dazzled by the prices that Chinese contemporary art is fetching in the world’s salesrooms. This year, Sotheby’s has held four auctions of contemporary Chinese art — in New York, London and Hong Kong — at which collectors, mostly American, have paid a total of $69.8 million. The biggest collector, Uli Sigg, the Charles Saatchi of Chinese art, is Swiss.

But it is the quality of the work that is of paramount importance. The China Pavilion in Liverpool, and China Power Station, Part 1 (until 5 November), jointly curated by the Serpentine Gallery and the Red Mansion Foundation, in the industrial carcase that is Battersea Power Station, present us with an opportunity to see what is being produced in China by artists who are almost all in their thirties and forties.

The energy evident here is comparable to that on show in the current Shanghai Biennale and in the boom in galleries, public and private, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.