In the Pickle Factory's tumbledown courtyard stood several life-size fiberglass statues depicting poor migrant laborers. A weary construction worker wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt stood staring; another peddled a bicycle cart. When they were shown in 2000, the pieces, by a talented young artist named Liang Shuo, helped spark a discussion in the newspapers about China's migrant population, who are flooding into the cities from the countryside and eking out a living with no medical care, no proper housing, and often no schools. "People related to those pieces," said Wallace. "They knew those people."

In the middle of the barbecue, Qing Qing, a conceptual artist, took me to her studio back at Factory 798, ten minutes away. Qing makes wispy, kimonolike sculptures out of hemp, but it's her dioramas that are shocking. In one, naked plastic baby dolls are crawling on a giant Webster's dictionary. When you pull out their pacifiers, they start wiggling and singing a screechy song, "I can see you everywhere!"

"They're looking, but they don't know what they're looking for," said Qing. "Society is like that these days. It's a very chaotic time." A few years ago, Qing produced a film of a woman's hands massaging a pig—a simultaneously hilarious and revolting comment on China's new fat cats, the businessmen who visit the ubiquitous massage parlors that front for brothels.

Between sips of red wine back at the Pickle Factory, sculptor Li Gang explained why he started making his exquisite bronze casts of tattered platform shoes. Li spent eight years in Australia before deciding that the art scene was more exciting in China. When he came back, he was moved by the poor rural girls coming to work in the factories, dressed in inappropriate trendy clothes. China today is one giant MTV-era Dickensian sweatshop, not so different from New York or London at the turn of the century. "The girls buy these dangerous, uncomfortable shoes, then cast them aside after a season," said Li. "The shoes are like the girls themselves—expendable. It's history, and with the bronze I can keep that memory forever."

The sudden rise of a market for Chinese art has led to much debate and backbiting. Western collectors are clamoring for top names, paying tens of thousands of dollars for their paintings. Superrealist Chen Yifei's oil paintings of dreamy Chinese women have sold for $450,000 at auction, and an oil painting by Fang Lijun, known for his bald-headed, grimacing faces, reportedly sold for $100,000 to an American collector. Those sales have led to debate and to copycat paintings. Artists are reeling at this sudden ability to make money. At Factory 798, Sui walked me from his sculpture studio to a workshop where workers were perched atop a thirty-foot-high scaffold, putting finishing touches on a grotesque cement sculpture of twisting dragons and other clichéd Chinese motifs. "This is what the graduates of the Central Academy are doing these days—commission work," said Sui, shaking his head. But isn't it okay, I ask, for them to make money on schlocky public art so that they can do their own work on the side? "The problem is, the more you do this kind of commission work," Sui answers, "the more you want more money."