In the mid-14th century a book was published called The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. It was a medieval bestseller, published in ten languages. It recounted a journey from the Black Sea to the heart of China and told tales of monsters with lips so pendulous that they could serve as sombreros and palaces lined with red panther skins and pillars of gold. It became the authoritative account of the land then known as Cathay, for in 1368 the Ming emperors closed its borders for the next 200 years. Cathay was to Europeans then as fantastic a place as outer space is to us now, so it is appropriate that Mandeville and his journey were entirely fictitious.

Until last year, when I first visited Japan, I too harboured a long-held fantasy of the Orient. In some ways I wish I could have kept it pure and not sullied it with messy reality.

I am frustrated that I won’t have the time to visit the dozens of exhibitions, lectures and special events set up under the umbrella of Asian Art in London. In its ninth year, it brings together London’s leading Asian-art dealers and major auction houses and societies. There are also museum shows to complement the event, such as Civilisation and Enlightenment: Arts of the Meiji Period at the V&A and Chola: Sacred Bronzes of Southern India at the Royal Academy.

Most of the shows are of antique or traditional Asian art. A few like those at the Opera, Olyvia Oriental and Art Pilgrim galleries are of contemporary works.

I have always been fascinated and influenced by the art of the Far East. Ever since I read that a Japanese nobleman rewarded a samurai general for winning a battle with a broken piece of a famous Edo tea bowl, I have been entranced by the exquisite dark culture of Japan. The shape of nearly every vase I have made has been copied from some antique piece of Chinese or Japanese porcelain. I still feel I am a crass Westerner stumbling about among the masterpieces of ancient ceramics.

I have made a sculpture based on a dream I had of a Tang-dynasty bronze. I have cribbed from a Buddhist monk’s robes and updated Chinese model tomb buildings from 150BC. I have drawn my version of a Chinese scroll, a Japanese woodcut print and an Indian miniature. In short, I am a lover and plunderer of art from the East. I like to think I am a tiny part in that cultural exchange that has been going on for centuries.

One of my favourite exhibitions of recent years was the Encounters show at the V&A. I have always loved the artistic version of Chinese whispers that produces such wonderful hybrids. Whether it be European attempts to manufacture blue and white porcelain or obscene souvenir geisha dolls made for American servicemen after the Second World War, I love the way both sides always get it just a bit wrong. I love the grotesque way that a Japanese print depicts 17th-century Dutch traders consorting with prostitutes or how the warriors from Cathay strutting around an English silver punchbowl are just stylised visual hearsay.

There is much talk in the art world of the boom in contemporary Asian art, especially from China. As a cultural Sinophile it pains me to say that what new Chinese art I have seen over the past few years has not impressed me. The attempts to keep in step with current Western art seem to me crude and melodramatic, such as the sub-Christo sculptures of Jiao Xingtao, in which he has wrapped up a bust of Mao, and the pop collage paintings of Ji Wen Yu on show at the Opera gallery. Much of what I have seen feels as if the artist thought there was a recipe for contemporary art, two parts Post-Modern to one part ironic Socialist Realism and a sprinkling of sex or politics.

The language of contemporary art can be as subtle as calligraphy or the glaze on a vase, except that the materials are ideas, intentions and references. The idioms of current art have grown organically over decades, if not centuries. Japan, which has interacted fully with the rest of the world since the Second World War, has many widely respected artists on the global art scene. China is only now opening up to full exposure to other cultures, and I think that their time as a contemporary art superpower will come, but maybe in a decade or two, when their artists have had time to develop a truly Chinese contemporary art. The critic Zhu Qi wrote an article titled “Why has art become so pretty?” in response to the trend among Chinese artists to produce market-pleasing works that has emerged after the angry outpourings of the 1980s, when restrictions were first relaxed.

Chinese work that to me seems more at ease with the knowing rebellion of contemporary art is already being made and shown in spaces such as the Shangart Gallery in Shanghai, where you could see pubic-hair bunting by Xu Zhan or Zhao Band’s works about his obsession with his cuddly panda, but still I remain to be convinced.

I was talking to someone who had just come back from Shanghai about Chinese contemporary art. He recounted how an artist had told him that in China he had encountered Western art developments “down the phone, in pieces that are not all there and not in the right order”. This seems to me like the starting point for some great art. Perhaps the ghost of Sir John Mandeville has been texting Beijing.

• Asian Art in London runs from tomorrow until Nov 10 at venues around the capital. See www.asianartinlondon.com for details