Walking into the new exhibition of contemporary photography and video from China at the V&A is a bit like walking into the centre of a brand new Chinese city thrown up on the spot. It feels just like Shenzen, for example, which is located just over the border from Hong Kong in a Special Economic Zone. Development, growth and the emergence of individual prosperity here have been so rapid that no one can keep track of the size of the population, whose average age is just 28. Fashion is fast-moving and everywhere there are videos and images, noises and messages clamouring for attention.

The design of this new show reproduces these sensations with vivid and exhilarating success (but mercifully without the smells and filth). Red and orange walls rise up in a seeming jumble of façades, tall and narrow and bathed in neon light. Videos flash images; strange noises and messages assail you from all directions. The installation and hang of this show is magnificent. It is a shame that the contents don’t come anywhere near the same standard.

Typical of the kind of work on display is the diptych by Song Dong, a 39-year-old Chinese photographer from Beijing. On New Year’s Eve 1996, seven years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he lay down after dark in the square and took a series of stills of himself breathing on the pavement. He stayed there motionless for 40 minutes, watched with intermittent interest by some soldiers. He was trying to make his breath turn to ice on the cement surface. The next day he did the same thing lying on the frozen surface of Houhai Lake, where his breathing made no mark on the ice. The work, he says, was about challenging monolithic authority. It showed that in Tiananmen Square his efforts, no matter how small, were effective and meaningful.

More self-indulgent stuff follows. Yin Xiuzhen (who happens to be married to Song Dong) is a 41-year-old photographer also from Beijing. In 1998 she stuck ten portraits of herself, some from childhood, some more recent, inside ten pairs of cloth shoes. Yin Xiuzhen believes that shoes carry their owner’s experiences, memories and traces of time. She sees them as boats, carrying a person’s identity for miles.

But perhaps the most painfully adolescent piece of work is by Ma Liuming, a 36-year-old from Huangshi. In 1998 he came up with the idea of walking stark naked along the Great Wall of China. Not only was he naked, but he was also wearing lipstick and eye-shadow and letting his long hair flow freely in the air like a girl’s. As a performance, the combination of androgynous sexuality and nakedness on the symbolic wall was provocative in the extreme. But he was allowed to walk until his feet bled, being photographed all the way. Perhaps the authorities considered the event too childish to bother with.

Experimental photographers are often intensely concerned with their own bodies, and it seems that Chinese experimental photographers are particularly so. This is partly explained by the history of oppression through which they have lived. The individual comes across with such pleading in these photographs because for so long the individual has been crushed in China by brutally enforced programmes of collectivisation.

Only in the past few years have the powers of the previously all-embracing institutions of family and Communist Party been eroded. The global consumer culture has arrived, recognising only individual satisfactions. Only now are restrictions on independent photographers being lifted. No longer are they subject to the dictates of party officials. No longer is the supply of cameras and other photographic equipment restricted.

This exhibition has already been shown in New York, Chicago and Seattle. After London it goes on to Berlin. Many of these photographers have already exhibited abroad and have their own dealers in China. A new class of hugely rich entrepreneurs is seeking to validate their new status by buying art. Some are buying back historic Chinese works sold abroad in earlier centuries, but many are also investing in cutting-edge Chinese art. And what could be more cutting edge than contemporary photography and video?

The dealers representing these artists stand to gain from this vast exhibition, which lends international credibility to the artists and makes their work much more valuable. But the question nobody seems to have asked is this: is the work any good? Much of it looks to me like the kind of work churned out all over the developed world by self-obsessed second-year art students. Would we be paying it any attention if it was being made by Germans or Australians? I sense a whiff of the emperor’ s new clothes about this show.

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China is at the V&A, SW7 (020-7942 2000), until Jan 15.