Suddenly, the avant-garde arts scene is now flourishing in the city where, it seems, anything goes

THAT giant pot noodle of a metropolis which is Shanghai is now mixing up all the ingredients to transform itself into a centre of the avant-garde art world that can compete with New York or London. In a grimy courtyard in the old French concession, members of China's tiny art world meet to sip chilled white wine and munch canapes. It is the opening of yet another gallery, BizArt, this time in a warehouse where tannery machinery was once made.

Two nights earlier the same crowd had congregated in the stripped-out rooms of the old Commercial Insurance building overlooking the Bund. Up on some scaffolding, Zhang Dali, an artist famous for being chased by the Beijing police for his street graffiti, used a spray can to daub the bare concrete walls with his signature 'AK-47' slogan in a piece of performance art.

Two Beijing-based American lawyers, Meg Maggio and Handel Lee, who set up The Courtyard, a fashionable restaurant and art gallery on the banks of the Forbidden City's moat, have bravely rented out four floors of the former insurance building in the hope of recreating their success on the muddy Yangpu.

'Shanghai now wants to be a major cultural centre. The leaders don't want a city like this to be just about money and real estate,' says German art critic Dr Stephanie Tasch, who is excited by the change in official policies over the past three years.

More than 20 art galleries have opened in that time, many exhibiting the works of artists such as Zhang Dali, who have a long history of unpleasant brushes with authorities of one kind or another.

Beijing remains the locus of modern and experimental art, although its leaders have repeatedly shut down exhibitions there or harassed the colony of artists who had congregated in a village near the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, forcing them to move.