THE TINY SYDNEY Chinatown gallery 4A is crammed to overflowing with both people and contemporary Asian art. Greeting visitors downstairs are strollers filled with fibreglass babies, each priced for 'adoption' at A$500 (HK$2,650) apiece. Beijing artist Jiang Jie believes as many as 50,000 mainland babies are adopted by foreigners each year and took photographs illustrating the issue for a local exhibition in 1994. 'They don't realise they have become part of the Chinese traffic, the Asian traffic and world traffic,' she says in her artist's statement. 'From here to there, or maybe nowhere, they are made to lose their roots. One day, maybe, some will come back to look for their native place and cause a traffic jam there.' The exhibition is part of Asian Traffic, a four-month project organised by the Asia-Australia Art Centre that includes seminars, panel discussions and talks by artists. There will also be works by 30 Asian and Asian-Australian artists shown between now and October. Hong Kong representation is strong. British-born David Clarke will show his black-and-white photographs of daily life in Hong Kong, while Renee So, who moved from Hong Kong to Australia, will exhibit sculptural knitted works based on 18th-century chinoiserie images. Upstairs from Jiang's unwanted babies are works by Hong Kong's Leung Mee-ping, who is also concerned about adoption. Best known for Memorise the Future - her collection of child-sized shoes made from human hair - Leung now shows Cherubic Island, a piece vaguely about a blind mainland girl adopted by westerners in Hong Kong. Leung uses crayons to draw childlike drawings on McDonald's napkins, creating a moving and gritty image of life in Hong Kong. 'My main concern is China-Hong Kong relations,' Leung says. 'Hong Kong is uniquely placed to make sense of how China is changing. So the changing of Hong Kong is the changing of China and the changing of China is the changing of the world.' According to Asia-Australia Arts Centre director Binghui Huangfu, Asian Traffic aims to explore 'the real issues in a region undergoing incomprehensible change by illustrating the density and depth of its contemporary art'. Huangfu's career started at Beijing's Cultural Palace. She continued her curatorial studies in Australia before moving to Singapore to spend seven years at LaSalle-SIA College's Earl Lu Gallery, later producing a series of international exhibitions. She returned to Australia where she believes contemporary art is more dynamic than in Singapore. 'Both Singapore and Hong Kong could be great centres of contemporary Asian art,' she says. 'They're natural crossroads. But their governments just don't understand the importance of Asian art in the world. There's no consistent budgetary support for cultural buildings - no connections made between buildings and culture.' Meanwhile, in Australia, Huangfu wants to rekindle an Asian fire. 'Here, change takes five or 10 years. In Asia, people are so passionate, change happens every day. So I've reflected that - having exhibitions that change every three weeks will reveal the speed and clashes, accidents and miscommunication that are the norm in Asia.' Huangfu is disappointed that politicians have halted Australia's push into Asia. 'Nobody seems to understand that Asia will leave Australia out, and Asian influence on the world will happen anyway,' she says. As well as a torrent of babies, there are videos, paintings, installations and a Thai shadow puppet show. Australian Shen Shaomin has a triple-headed, eight-legged skeletal creature - its ribs and leg bones carved with religious texts in a variety of calligraphy. On the walls are Manit Sriwanichpoom's photo series of a stout, pink Asian man pushing a pink supermarket trolley into a variety of Asian spiritual settings. A couple of veiled figures from Dutch-born, Indonesia-based Mella Jaarsma's installation on origins and identity lie on the floor. Asian Traffic started with a two-day conference on the Asian diaspora at a nearby art college in June. Both itinerant and home-bound artists tackled subjects such as 'Fast Cars and New Silk Roads', 'On Not Speaking Chinese' and 'The Absent Hong Kong!' This last contribution was Leung's retelling of her experience at a South Korean event where she somehow represented Shanghai, and where none of the visiting artists' Japanese technology was compatible with the hosts' Korean machines. The keynote speaker was Guangzhou-born, Paris-based Hou Hanru, one of the curators of the notorious 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing where a shot was fired, the show closed down and artists arrested. He had a few thoughts on curatorial strategy - making the case for reclaiming public space, as he had for the 2003 Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. But he seemed more concerned that many mainland artists now live like pop stars and work in 'studios big enough to play football in' to produce art that is at best 'subversion for the pleasure of the bourgeoisie'. Instead, Hou believes criticism and analysis of urban life and globalisation will be Chinese artists' great contribution to world art. 'I've always been a city boy - living in the midst of pollution and concrete - so I'm obsessive about the global city. And today, the map is no longer flat and horizontal but vertically layered to create a network of urban masses. Only by tackling the issues raised by urbanisation can art reclaim its cultural position in the world,' he says. Asian Traffic, Tue-Sat, 11am-6pm, Gallery 4A, 181-187 Hay St, Sydney. Inquiries: 612 9212 0380, www.4a.com.au . Ends Oct 4