Twenty-one years ago, the first commercial gallery in China opened in a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty building, the Dongbianmen watchtower in the heart of Beijing.

Established by a former Australian backpacker from rural New South Wales, the Red Gate Gallery featured the work of seven artists in its first show of July 1991. All the works sold - to foreigners - at a time when there was no domestic market for contemporary Chinese art, which has since gone on to command wild prices around the world.

At the epicentre of the earth-shaking growth in contemporary Chinese art has been Brian Wallace, who first travelled to the country in search of big adventure on a small budget in 1984.

The young Australian was bitten by the China bug and returned for two years on a scholarship to learn Mandarin and, later, art history. Falling in with the local students in Beijing, Wallace helped find them spaces for temporary exhibitions as artistic expression started loosening up in a stop-start fashion in the capital and elsewhere.

"I had been doing exhibitions in the late 80s right up to April 1989 (two months before the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown) and then, of course, everything stopped and I went off and did other things," Wallace says, before jumping on a plane in Beijing to come to Perth for Red Gate's first exhibition in WA. "But after two years my sense was that everything was starting to relax again." In a stroke of good fortune, Wallace's pop-up shows turned into something more enduring when the Bureau of Cultural Relics handed him the magnificent old fortified watchtower for a relatively cheap rent so that it could be put to good use.

"We had no idea where it was going to go because it was very, very early days for anything like that in China," he says. It took another five years for another commercial gallery to open in China, and that was in Shanghai.

Today, Red Gate is a respected trailblazer in the contemporary Chinese art scene and a hub for international cultural artistic exchanges through its vibrant residency program for artists, writers, musicians and academics from around the world.

One of those pioneering Red Gate artists from that first 1991 show is Wang Lifeng, one of 10 established artists including Su Xinping, Liu Qinghe and Zhou Jirong who were asked recently to nominate an admired younger artist to be showcased alongside them in a joint exhibition.

The result is Two Generations: 20 years of Chinese Contemporary Art, a lively cross-section of the booming Chinese art scene as seen through the curatorial eyes of Wallace and Catherine Croll, Red Gate's director of cultural partnerships in Australia.

The exhibition straddles diverse styles and media but many of the 28 artists represented in it provide social commentary about many things in China, particularly the rapid pace of change. "Most of the older artists I have been working with over the past 15 to 20 years were growing up after the Cultural Revolution with a very critical eye," Wallace says.

Two Generations was opened in Beijing by the Australian Ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, in July 2011. It has been touring Australia in 2012 - the Year of Chinese Culture in Australia and the Year of the Dragon - and is the first show to open in the dazzling new Linton and Kay Galleries in the refurbished old Perth Tech on St Georges Terrace.

The significance of this cultural export from Beijing has not been lost on those riding the China-inspired economic boom here in Australia. Premier Colin Barnett, Chinese Consul-General Wang Yiner and Rio Tinto iron ore boss Sam Walsh will be opening Two Generations, which is held in the Brookfield Place precinct, whose major tenant is BHP Billiton. The exhibition also marks the 40th anniversary of Australian-Chinese diplomatic ties, so the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Chinese Ministry of Culture have worked hard to pull it together.

"It has been some time since there has been a large show of contemporary Chinese art touring Australia and I don't think WA gets much anyway, so this is a very special opportunity," Wallace says. "We are very thankful to Rio for supporting it and it is a great way to open a new gallery."

He hopes it will be the start of regular exhibition tours to Australia.

For gallery directors Linton Partington and Gary Kay, the Two Generations opening is a great way to make a splash with existing and potential clients along the Terrace.

Partington says the duo, who established their first gallery in Subiaco in 1998, had wanted to bring some major cultural and art events to Perth for some time and the new space, one of the biggest commercial galleries in the country, will allow them to do that. The gallery, which spans 480sqm and three first-floor exhibition spaces in the 1910 Federation gothic building, will also host the Black Swan Prize for Portraiture next month, and has attracted strong interest for corporate functions in the increasingly lively Brookfield Place development.

Two Generations is at Linton and Kay Galleries, 137 St Georges Terrace, from tomorrow to September 16. Details: lintonandkay.com.au.