Chinese contemporary art made a splash in the late 1990s with the so-called Mao Goes Pop movement, which broke big among Western gallerygoers and collectors.
The art was fun, cheap, iconoclastic and readable: With China racing to modernize, who couldn't appreciate a painting of Mao Zedong hailing a taxi?
The pioneers of the style are now China's established artists, and, along with them, the market for new Chinese art has also grown. Beijing-based China Guardian, the country's leading auction house, sold some 5 billion yen of Chinese paintings in 2004 -- almost triple the previous year's total.