Wang Guangyi, one of China’s pioneering contemporary artists, was there. So were Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and 20 other well-known Chinese artists and their guests to celebrate the opening of a solo exhibition of new works by Zeng Hao, another rising star in China’s bubbly art scene.

“We’ve had opening dinners before,” said the Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, sipping Chilean red wine, “but nothing quite like this until very recently.”

In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million worth of Asian contemporary art, most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. In 2004 the two houses combined sold $22 million in Asian contemporary art.

In November a painting by Liu Xiaodong, 43 sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist. That price put Liu in the company of the few living artists, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, whose work has sold for $2 million or more.

“What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer specialising in Asian contemporary art. “There’s a revolution under way.”

The auction frenzy has also sparked debate here about whether sales are artificially inflating prices and encouraging speculators, rather than real collectors, to enter the art market.

Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art.

As a result, China’s leading avant-garde artists have morphed into multi-millionaires who show up at exhibitions wearing Gucci and Ferragamo.

Wang Guangyi, best-known for his Great Criticism series of Cultural Revolution-style paintings emblazoned with the names of popular Western brands, like Coke, Swatch and Gucci, drives a Jaguar and owns a 10,000-square-foot luxury villa.

Yue Minjun, who makes legions of colourful smiling figures, has a walled-off suburban Beijing compound with an 8,000-square-foot home and studio. Fang Lijun, a “Cynical Realist” painter whose work captures artists’ post-Tiananmen disillusionment, owns six restaurants in Beijing and operates a small hotel in western Yunnan province.

More than any other Chinese artist Zhang, with his huge paintings depicting family photographs taken during the

Cultural Revolution, has captured the imagination of international collectors. In October 2006, the British collector Charles Saatchi bought Zhang’s work at Christie’s for $1.5 million and his Tiananmen Square sold to a private collector for $2.3 million.

Some critics here say the focus on prices has led to a decline in creativity as artists knock off variations of their best-known work rather than exploring new territory. Some are even employing teams of workers in assembly-line fashion.

But Lorenz Helbling, director of the ShanghART Gallery here, said Chinese artists continue to produce an impressive array of works, and that talk about the market being overrun by commercialism is exaggerated.

“Things are much better than they were 10 years ago,” he said. “Back then many artists were commissioned to simply paint dozens of paintings for a gallery owner, who went out and sold those works.’’

—New York Times / david barboza