BEIJING — It is said that two thousand years ago, two priests brought the first Buddhist scriptures from India to China on the back of a pure white horse.

China first absorbed India’s religion, and then, in the 19th century, its opium and cotton.

But for the past half-century, China and India, the world’s most populous nations, have been uncomfortable neighbors. A war in 1962 followed by decades of tension over their borders have created little but mutual suspicion.

There is no quick fix for these deep-seated problems, but there are murmurs of a widening dialogue between the two nations, at least on the cultural front.

As with those Buddhist scriptures millennia ago, paintings covered in bindis, sculptures crafted in the furniture markets of Mumbai and miniature cities bent from the metal of India’s scrap heaps have traveled east and moved into the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art here, one of the most prominent contemporary art museums in China.

The show, “Indian Highway,” was produced in conjunction with the Serpentine Gallery in London. It features 29 artists and 130 individual pieces. A traveling exhibition, it first was staged in London in 2008, but at every stop it has been reincarnated, with new works, artists and curators, and redesigned to incorporate elements related to the host country.

This is the largest show of art from India to ever make it to China, where any display of culture from India is rare.

Phil Tinari, director of the Ullens Center, invited the Serpentine to bring “Indian Highway” to China soon after becoming director late last year. Mr. Tinari then traveled to Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai in January and February with the arts center’s founder, Guy Ullens, to lay the groundwork for the exhibition.

The show is not without its controversies. Westerners often praise India for having a democratic government, in contrast to China’s authoritarian rule, but Indian officials succeeded in having a piece removed from the exhibition for political reasons. At an Indian Ministry of External Affairs news conference in Delhi last month, a spokesman confirmed that officials had asked the Ullens Center to remove “I Love My India,” a work by Tejal Shah, because of its “politically controversial overtones.”

In the work, the artist plays back recordings of people at an amusement fair being asked what they think of the slaughter of Muslims by Hindu extremists in Gujarat State in 2002. Some of those interviewed blamed official corruption and the failure of democracy for the hundreds of deaths.

The Indian Embassy in Beijing has generally been supportive of the show. It paid for two of the artists to come to China and helped to find sponsors.

“There was actually no way that this would happen on a higher official level at this moment,” Mr. Tinari said at the opening on June 24. “It’s a very complex and multifaceted relationship, and on the Indian side there is a less formal developed apparatus for this kind of exchange.”

The works were mostly gathered in Rome, where the last installation of “Indian Highway” was shown, and shipped from there. Mr. Tinari said that further challenges in bringing the exhibition to China were its size and a broad inquiry by Chinese officials into the importation of art.

“In the end, the shipment arrived on our premises just three-and-a-half days before the opening,” he said.

From 2006 to 2008, the Arario Gallery here and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art each held a group exhibition of Indian artists. Between those years Arario sold 30 Indian works valued at a total of $2.5 million to Chinese buyers, but interest from Chinese collectors then appeared to dissolve. Artists and museums hope that “Indian Highway” will rekindle the flame.

“I’d wanted to visit China for a long time and interact with people,” said Dayanita Singh, one of the artists who went to China for the opening. She added that she hoped to do some work in China.

But despite the art world’s enthusiasm for such cultural exchanges, the exhibition has provoked mixed reactions in China. Relations between the world’s largest democracy and its most populous autocracy are beset by competitive anxieties. A military arms race is occurring in parallel to an economic one. The media in both nations weigh in vocally.

This sense of competition is no less evident when it comes to art. Last year, an article with the headline “China way ahead of India in contemporary art” appeared in The Economic Times of India; a Chinese translation was later posted on several Internet forums.

In an article about this exhibit, the state-run Beijing News asked: “Will Indian art overtake China’s?” One Chinese Internet user wrote on a microblog that the exhibit showed that “between our countries, there is underlying but fierce competition.”

Some in China worried that Guy and Myriam Ullens, the founders of the art center here and owners of an important collection of Chinese art, were shifting their interests from Chinese to Indian art. Last year they put 105 Chinese pieces up for auction, while several of the works on show in Beijing are Indian additions to their collection.

Dinesh Vazirani, director of the online auction house Saffronart, said such fears were “interesting but strange,” noting that Chinese art accounted for 41 percent of worldwide auction sales last year, while Indian art accounted for less than one percent. He said the competition was more “psychological.”

For the Indian artists who traveled to Beijing, like Ms. Singh and Sudarshan Shetty of Mumbai, the show was not an expression of rivalry but an attempt to make cultural connections.

One work that captured the theme of dialogue was “Being Chongqing” by Hetain Patel, who was born in Britain. Mr. Patel collaborated on the work with the Chinese artist Ren Qian, whom he met during a residency in China in 2009.

Both artists appear separately on a split screen in a video filmed at two different locations. Mr. Patel mimicked the gestures and speech of Mr. Ren as each made hand motions and read the same words from a piece of paper.

The piece was intended to question the foundations needed for cross-cultural dialogue.

Many of the works also demonstrate a political activism less common in art from China: A video of India’s map that is redrawn 100 times reminds us of India’s territorial tensions.

“We Chinese are stronger and more powerful, but you can see India’s sense of public political debate is deeply felt in many of the works here,” said a Chinese student visiting the exhibition who gave her name as Lili.

She made the comment before the work “I Love My India” was removed, as she stood a few feet away from the video.

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, directors of the Serpentine Gallery in London, said the exhibition was not meant to showcase differences between the strengths of India and China. But perhaps that was inevitable in any dialogue about the two nations.

“It is important to look at the very different culture that exists in China and India,” Ms. Peyton-Jones said. “If art is the key expression of liberal culture, it would be clear that India is the place to look to for lessons of hope for the democratization of China. Yet surprisingly, it is China that has built up a strong culture of art institutions.” In any case, both countries are cultivating strong links in the art world, she said. “It is just a question,” she said, “of when this will happen en masse.”