On the opening night of the much-hyped SH Contemporary Art Fair in Shanghai, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija offered visitors some advice hidden in a free snack of rice. Among the grains was the message: "Rich Bastards Beware." The four-day fair, with a preview on Sept. 5, was billed as a unique overview of the best Asian contemporary art and touted as the test for whether China's art juggernaut could keep rolling. It succeeds on both counts. The event's massive footprint throughout the extraordinary Shanghai Exhibition Center, a monument to Soviet-style architecture, is matched by the variety of works on display from across the region. On the opening night, leading Chinese artists were outselling everything else, even at prices many times higher than works from most other nations. Fair director Lorenzo Rudolph, a former director of Art Basel, and Swiss dealer Pierre Huber, the curator, have brought together more than 100 galleries from around the world. About a third are from China, including Universal Studios, Beijing Commune, ShanghArt, and Beijing Art Now. Foreign galleries that focus on Chinese art are also well represented, such as Arndt & Partner from Berlin and New York, Switzerland's Urs Meile and Italy's Marella and Continua. Certainly not all the exhibits are by great masters, but there are artists here with a masterful command of expression. Gu Dexin's untitled installation alludes to a mass -- 30 tons of apples -- at the mercy of a single monster force -- a steamroller. Qiu Xiaofei offers a three-dimensional trompe l'oeil of a typical Chinese kitchen and bathroom, the objects hand cast and the surfaces made to look like the real thing. So real that a plastic-looking bowl was commandeered by workers to catch rainwater from a leak in the ceiling. |I'm just grateful they didn't use the toilet," the artist quipped. Wedding-Cake Setting Leaks aside, the building, with its dramatic staircases, vaulted ceilings, and wedding-cake frostings, is a particularly dynamic setting for contemporary art. There's an impressive presence from India, galleries as well as artists, reflecting Huber's recent focus on "the Silk Road," a project that draws on art communities in India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. The work is strong, diverse, in a rich assortment of media, and reasonably priced, in spite of the accelerating hype for Indian art. Price Rises The South Asian nation is following in the footsteps of China, where prices have risen out of all proportion to other markets. Beijing's Star Gallery, which specializes in young, or "cartoon-generation" Chinese artists, offers painted objects from female artist Chen Ke at $60,000-$160,000. Works by newcomer Qiu Xin are tagged at 150,000 yuan ($19,885) a piece: not much less than the 21,500 euros ($29,365) Michael Schultz Galerie is asking for a monumental work, "Instant Help," by Berlin painter Jan Muche. Galerie Continua, one of the most dynamic booths in the fair, shows paintings by revered Italian painter Luca Pancrazzi. A triptych costs 20,000 euros, a stunning glass-shard covered lightbulb 12,000 euros. Next to them, new paintings from Beijing- based Yan Lei are priced at 90,000 euros. Size matters. Large-scale works by artists such as pioneering avant-gardist Yayoi Kusama are among the hottest tickets at the fair. Anyone looking for a correction in prices of Chinese art will be disappointed. One of the finest works in the show, and one of the rarest, is a landscape from Chinese artist Liu Wei, offered by Marlborough Gallery for a staggering $450,000. Others seem like a bargain, such as the delicate paper works of Bangalore-based Ravikumar Kashi -- paper pulp cast in the shape of a book -- for $1,500 at Gallery Samukha. Kitsch and Sex Market issues aside, the fair fulfills its purpose, providing a solid overview of current trends and individual artists in the region, even where that centers on feeding the Western taste for kitsch and sex. Yoshitomo Nara, a superstar of the genre, is awarded a solo display, which is disappointing: The work is nice, but obvious. A second solo display in the Best of Discovery section by Tokyo-based Enlightenment Group is more powerful and complex. The fair's Best of Artists and Best of Discovery offer solo exhibitions by leading artists and have pride of place. They include an installation by the late Chen Zhen, "Purification Room," with objects from daily life doused in a monochrome layer of clay that renders all petrified. Ai Weiwei's coal-work "Mei le," or "not what it seems," a play on the Chinese word for coal, is 160,000 euros, which, given the prices around, looks reasonable for an artist of his standing. SH Contemporary runs through Sept. 9 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center.