It was a vernissage for the bright and the beautiful. Le tout Beijing had turned out. The date was 1986 and the more fashionable men wore T-shirts and affected shaggy hair. For the few women, the look was little different – except for the odd set of high heels. A sprinkling of foreigners added splashes of colour to the rare gathering in a temporary art gallery. The atmosphere crackled with excitement.

Public showings of contemporary art were rare. An air of derring-do infused the show. In hushed tones, art aficionados, painters and the odd diplomat discussed the question of the day. How would the Communist authorities respond to an exhibition that conformed neither to socialist realist norms nor party propaganda guidelines?

This first public show in Beijing by the artist Xu Bing drew gasps from visitors as they turned a corner into a room draped with his works of printed volumes and scrolls inscribed with thousands of Chinese characters. Then the viewer realised that these were not real Chinese characters, but words that the artist had invented.

Many visitors were confused. Few people in China had even been allowed to see art that did fall into carefully censored boxes. Traditional ink paintings of misty landscapes had been allowed since the decade-long ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. Of course, images of courageous People’s Liberation Army soldiers and revolutionary workers were encouraged. But this generation of young new artists defied categorisation, and they defied the censors.

Artists like Xu Bing wanted to experiment. After decades of communist constraints, they wanted to force open a gap in the curtain that had stifled creativity for so long. They had to combat not only the heavy hand of official disapproval but the burden of poverty.

The life of an artist in a China struggling to shrug off Stalinist-style central planning in favour of capitalist-style economic freedoms was confusing. Even avant-garde artists assumed they could finance their work by eating from the iron rice bowl long guaranteed by the socialist system. They might live in a garret – or in many cases much worse – but they would not have to starve for their art.

I remember visiting the young artist Guan Wei, then a schoolteacher living with his wife in one room in a government-supplied dormitory. The descendant of an aristocratic Manchu family, Guan Wei had begun to paint oils depicting grey-blue faceless figures dotted with Chinese characters marking acupuncture pressure points. The canvases were stacked up around the walls of the room. The poverty of his circumstances could not deter him from his passion to paint. He and his wife seemed to live a hand-to-mouth existence. He was more than happy to sell a work so that his wife could afford to buy fresh vegetables and he could stock up on paint supplies.

He was not alone. Some artists in the Eighties had already quit the security of a state job and the pittance it paid. They wanted to strike off on their own to paint as they pleased. They lived in rundown hovels down Beijing’s back alleys. Some found strength in numbers, congregating into communities on the edge of the capital. Both local residents and the police looked askance at these artist villages. Once the communities reached a certain scale and began to attract droves of foreign visitors, the police would move in and raze the area.

This has happened again and again – but latterly with less frequency. Over the past two decades, contemporary artists have moved from beyond the pale and on to centre-stage. It seemed to happen overnight: artists were inducted into the establishment.

International recognition – equalling money and fame – has been crucial. The mayor of the Beijing suburb of Tongxian got a shock a couple of years ago when he travelled abroad and was welcomed by dignitaries in Europe eager to hear about the artists’ village in his backyard. The embarrassed official, whose only knowledge of the community came from police reports about long-haired degenerates building houses among the peach orchards, returned home and set about taking the artists into the party’s embrace.

It was becoming clear to the communist authorities that Chinese art had gained international fame and also represented big money. The works had won critical acclaim – and record prices; they had come to represent the vibrancy of new talent in China rather than a threat to party authority. Xu Bing’s works, for example, command hundreds of thousands of dollars. Guan Wei has been adopted by his new homeland in Australia as one of its finer painters. A painting by cynical realist artist Yue Minjun fetched £2.9 million at a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art in London last month.

Of course, there are artists who still live in single-storey hovels. But they believe they can aspire to owning an architect-designed studio behind high walls if they can catch the eye of a collector.

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