This is a little glimpse of the sculpture by Taiwanese artist Huang Zhiyang. He had his opening last night at Pekin Fine Arts. In case you can't make it out, these are gold-leaf giant cocoons set on top of a black plexi base filled with flashing red LED signs. Doesn't that sound over the top?

At dinner after the opening, people were discussing the state of Chinese art, which is clearly past the pioneer stage but not yet into anything approaching maturity. I had spent Saturday running around different galleries and I was pretty disappointed. The best show I saw all day was the Hans Op de Beeck exhibition at Continua, an animation with beautiful drawings of his impressions of China. The worst show of the day was Qui Zhijie's installation at the Ullens Center, big, pompous and too much of everything to make much sense.

When are the Chinese artists going to take responsibility to make their work as good as possible? That's what I asked at dinner. Most blamed the west for choosing the wrong Chinese artists. Meg Maggio of Pekin Fine Arts argued that the generation who made it big in the west--those painters such as Liu Xiaodong or Zhang Xiaogang--were the last gasp of state artist system, playing the game with the Ministry of Culture types in order to have access to museum shows in China and trips abroad. She felt that something new was on the horizon. Obviously, the education system here has a lot of catching up to do as well, since teaching artists to critique themselves is not part of the vocabulary here. Meg has been dealing with the problem by showing more and more artists from Taiwan and Korea, in addition to young Chinese artists. I have to be careful not to be too New York centric when I approach the art I see here, but now that all the top Chinese artists are showing in New York, I am not sure it is so bad to apply the same standards that I use for all the other art I see. Hopefully, I'll find some new names on this trip that will give me more hope. Huang Zhiyang is not a bad start.