Chinese art is immensely popular. In only a few years, a market has arisen in Beijing and Shanghai that doubles in size every few years. One artist after the other is making a fortune, buying a luxury car and moving into an upscale neighbourhood. While scores of exhibitions of Chinese art are opening in the West in anticipation of the Olympic Games, METROPOLIS M sent the following provocation to four critics, curators and artists: Is the art market killing all creativity in Chinese art?

Galleries are elbowing one another to have him as one of their artists. Navid Nuur (born in Tehran, now living in the Hague) is a major talent in Dutch art. His work is as broad as it is poetic, both relaxed and well-wrought. He is an intelligent handyman with broad visual capability, operating at the edges of what can be said and shown.

From flower power to punk – pyschedelia comes in many guises. Its multiplicity of forms is part of what inspires the fascination for this movement that continues to this day. In 2005 and 2006 there was a large retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt and Liverpool called Summer of Love. Lars Bang Larsen, currently busy with his doctoral research, is a specialist on the subject. METROPOLIS M asked him to expound upon the deeper meaning of the movement.

A self-created stage and performance in Tate Modern, a complex historical installation and a film in Docking Station at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam: the work of Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, 1974) is currently hot. The art of this Paris and Hamburg-based artist focuses on the meaning of gesture, on movement, arrest and repetition. It is theatrical to the core. A talk with the artist in her studio in Paris.

According to some, dance is the space in which social possiblities are tried out. Based on the art of Katarzyna Kobro, Paulina Olowska, Silke Otto-Knapp and others, Jan Verwoert demonstrates how this social choreography should not be taken too literally.