Across town, the Courtyard Gallery, Beijing's most established, was showing neon works by the Luo brothers that seemed to celebrate China's new commercialization. The ride there was the perfect prelude. My taxi crawled along Chang'an Avenue, past the glittering Oriental Plaza shopping mall, Starbucks, and McDonald's. Turning right off Beijing's main drag, we were suddenly on Nan Chizi, a tree-lined lane where bicyclists ringing their bells wove past old-fashioned food stands. Some of China's leaders still live in grand courtyard houses behind the street's gray walls, but most of the buildings are replicas. (Such is the drive to modernize in China that the government has torn down most of historic Beijing, only to belatedly reproduce a few houses.) The Courtyard Gallery is in a genuine old courtyard house near the Forbidden City.

The Luo brothers show portrayed kitsch images of consumer products and retro propaganda posters that capture the sensory chaos of China. In Welcome to the World's Famous Brands No. 6, smiling fat babies clutching a huge can of orange Fanta are superimposed on a red sun rising over the Forbidden City. From a poor family in southern Guangxi province, the three Luo brothers have become internationally known—and rich—stirring debate about the value of kitsch as art. "I'm not nostalgic about the era when artists had no money," said Meg Maggio, who runs the Courtyard. "Commercialism is a good thing." Like Wallace, Maggio studied in China in the mid-1980s, then worked as a lawyer in Beijing before getting involved in the art world. "This work is an accurate reflection of the artists' lives," she said. "They're commenting on consumer madness. Beijing itself is a wild kitsch festival."

The carnival begins at night, when the city's neon signs come to life. There are bars and discos all over town—from the Yan Club at Factory 798 to the chic eateries in the Houhai district, north of the Forbidden City, where I met some artist friends at a bar called Sex in Da City. Sitting on velvet couches in a souklike interior, we drank coffee and beer. "The art world has gotten very crazy," said Wang Shugang, a sculptor. "Profit is the only standard these days."

If money is increasingly seductive to some artists, their work still reflects a revolutionary new wave in China: individualism. The new spirit shows up in many art forms, from nudity to dark videos depicting alienation. Today's young artists are cynical about politics. "They are already living in the new world, figuring out, "What is life like in these new apartments?' " said Lorenz Helbling, the Chinese-speaking Swiss owner of the Shanghart Gallery in Shanghai and a leading expert on avant-garde Chinese art. Yang Fudong, one of China's most innovative artists, makes videos that reflect the confusion sparked by commercialization. In The First Intellectual, a man wearing a suit carries a briefcase and a brick. He is covered in blood, looking as if he has been hit by something but doesn't know what.