JAPAN AND CHINA may have pulled up the diplomatic drawbridges and retreated to their rhetorical citadels after months of bitter political exchanges, but at least one channel of communication has remained open: art. More than 100,000 Japanese recently filed through the Tokyo National Museum to view a collection of Chinese Buddhist artefacts, and the Mori Art Museum's exhibition of art and culture from the Eastern Han to the Tang dynasties (AD25-220 to AD618-907) is expected to draw similar crowds. If these retrospectives demonstrate that Japan is trying to re-engage, at least culturally, with a country from which it borrowed so many traditions, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, now showing at the Mori, shows many Japanese are also keen to understand where their fast-growing neighbour is headed. Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium, features the work of 19 Chinese artists who are, says the Mori, 'confronting issues of history versus the reality of globalisation today'. Most are aged under 40 and are energised by the enormous upheavals of their homeland. Because they did not appear on the international art scene until the late 1990s, many of the artists will be new to Japanese audiences. Those hoping for political fireworks, though, may be disappointed, says senior curator Mami Kataoka. She says she and the museum's art director, David Elliott, set out to choose artists who have a 'fresh view of China'. 'Throughout the late 80s and 90s, the tradition of Chinese artists was against the government and a lot of exhibitions were closed down. But this new generation doesn't really attack the government,' she says. 'They're not politicians so they're not trying to change society; they use humour and irony to comment on what is happening in society.' The focus is not on artists who want to get arrested but on those who 'embrace the delights and pitfalls of global culture with ironical and laconic fervour'. The exhibit's title piece gives a flavour of what this might mean. In Wang Qingsong's Follow Me!, the photographer sits in front of a giant blackboard filled with a cacophony of signs in Chinese and English; Marxism, the Cultural Revolution and other word relics from China's recent past fight for space with hackneyed phrases from the universal English conversation phrasebook and the cultural symbols of global capitalism: Nike, McDonald's, the Olympics. In the centre are the words 'Let China walks towards the world! Let the world learn about China'. Wang points his instructor's stick at the mess. But despite what the blurb calls 'a sideways comment perhaps on China's recent wave of privatisation and opening up to foreign markets', enlightenment seems in desperately short supply; the message seems to be: Where are we going? Don't ask me. The lighthearted exploration of China's headlong rush into modernity can also be found in Cao Fei's hilarious Hip Hop, a three-minute digital video of ordinary Chinese folk in Mao suits and factory uniforms getting freaky to an imported hip-hop track. The lack of inhibition, not to mention technique, by one particularly enthusiastic construction worker can be read on many levels, says Mori's publicist Edan Corkhill: perhaps that China doesn't understand the rules of this new global game, 'or that it doesn't matter because they are having fun doing their own thing'. Many of the exhibits, which rely on photographic and video media, are more likely to provoke smiles than a police raid, although at least one has caused controversy. Liu Zheng's photographs from Survivors, featuring heavily made-up casualties of an unspecified disaster, were apparently banned in the US because they offended post-9/11 sensibilities. And some at least explore the poignant side of runaway development, such as Shao Yinong and Mu Chen's photographs of old abandoned community halls - a symbol of 'the collective memory and political dramas of the previous century'. Kataoka believes that despite the cultural specificity of these pieces and the enormous differences in the contemporary experiences of Japan and China, the exhibition will resonate with a Japanese audience, particularly in its themes of urban and social change. 'We want to be a window for art in Asia so we try not to connect art and politics too much,' she says. 'Art is beyond politics. The phenomena these artists are commenting on are quite similar to Japan's bubble economy [when lax credit policies fuelled a land and share-price boom that crashed in the early 1990s]. We knew it wasn't real and wouldn't last for long, and these artists also have a sense of how unstable things are. I have a sense they are trying to alert society.' This instability is expressed in some striking images, such as Yang Zhenzhong's Light as Easy, which shows his subject balancing the Shanghai Pudong Tower upside down on his index finger. We live in a confusing, topsy-turvy world, it seems to suggest, where everything is in transition and, to paraphrase a famous German philosopher once popular in China: all that is solid is melting into air. Just to prove how confusing, along comes the official blurb for the exhibition, which says one of the organisers is the Sankei Shimbun. Can this be Japan's most nationalist newspaper, from the same publishing house that brought us the revisionist history textbook that has helped send relations between China and Japan to their lowest level in decades? Apparently so. The Mori insists there is no conspiracy, just the normal run of events in the world of contemporary exhibitions. 'It's a normal thing,' says Kataoka. 'The Sankei is not directly involved and the artistic direction is decided by us. The organisation is rotated around companies.' Still, as an illustration of the hall of mirrors that is Sino-Japanese relations, it would be hard to beat. A cruel observer might say the publisher's left hand is working hard to enlighten Japanese audiences about its contemporary near neighbour while its right hand obfuscates the past. Such are the channels that China and Japan use to talk these days. But at least they're talking. Follow Me! Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium, Mori Art Museum Roppongi, Tokyo, until Sep 4. Inquiries: 81 3 6406 6111 or www.mori.art.museum/followme