It's difficult to digest just how much, and how fast, China has changed. For travelers absorbing the glitzy shopping malls and traffic-clogged roads of its cities, or looking at today's bold art—from haunting video installations to oil paintings showing alienation, chaos, or sarcasm—it's hard to remember where the country was only yesterday. China has abandoned socialism in everything but name and hurled itself into an exuberant and ruthless sort of capitalism, with opportunity and scams around every corner and precious few social safety nets. Overnight, the Chinese have become businessmen, wheeler-dealers, and hustlers. Everywhere you look, there's evidence of the rush to be modern. Old neighborhoods are falling to bulldozers. Cranes dot the skyline. Where red Maoist banners once hung, neon signs advertise everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to real estate developments and massage parlors.

Artists are struggling to interpret this rapid social change—hyper-urbanization, the widening gulf between rich and poor, crude commercialization. Factory 798 faces commercial pressures every day; in fact, developers are interested in tearing the compound down. Money is China's new obsession, and artists are quickly learning how to market themselves. "China is booming, and you have the instant millionaire mentality," says Gu Wenda, a well-known Shanghai experimental artist who now lives in Brooklyn. "Artists are a perfect reflection of what's happening in China. There's this tremendous energy, a huge race for the commercial market."

To see how artists are dealing with all this upheaval, I went to visit Sui Jianguo, an internationally successful sculptor, in his Factory 798 studio. A taxi took me along the Fourth Ring Road, a new highway through what in the 1980s was a hodgepodge of farmland and factories. The area is built up now, and at midday the road can be choked with traffic, doubling the half-hour trip from Tiananmen Square. The driver finally turned into the unmarked factory compound (it was lucky I had good directions, since he had no clue) and drove past the long public message board where workers still stop to read the posted newspaper. Then we saw signs for an art bookstore, the gallery space, and the AT Café, where I was to meet Sui (pronounced sway).

The café has exposed pipes and artwork spoofing Mao's sayings. Sui sported a black leather jacket, a gray turtleneck, and a goatee. Sipping our cappuccinos, we might have been in the Chelsea gallery district in Manhattan. He is extremely rich by Chinese standards. He lives in a chic, well-appointed Beijing apartment, and his sculptures—giant fiberglass Mao jackets, in particular—have sold to collectors in the West for more than fifty thousand dollars.

Yet Sui comes from another China, one that seems almost surreal now. He was ten years old when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade during which being "red," or Communist, was the only standard for measuring success. Sui started work at sixteen in a textile factory, where he toiled from 1972 to 1979, shortly after Mao's Red Guards swept across the country, shutting schools and ransacking temples. His childhood was a time of violence and destruction—but also of idealism. Money didn't matter, and, in theory, people aspired to a collective dream.