It's all over for Raphael and the Medicis: this is the year of the

The traditional view of China as inscrutable, hermetic and threatening is overturned by two shows in Italy

China: at the Court of the Emporers Palazzo Strozzi FLORENCE Cina Cina Cina!!! La Strozzina FLORENCE

The Renaissance, as wags remark, killed art stone dead in Florence. Five centuries on - unlike Venice, Milan and even the hated Siena - the city that gave us Raphael has no living art scene. So the opening of a contemporary art space there is larded with significance, the more so as the space is in that epicentre of Quattrocento patronage, the Palazzo Strozzi.

This makes the title of the new show at La Strozzina - Cina Cina Cina!!! - bring you up short. The mantle of Raphael, lately handed on, goes not to Florentine (or even Italian or Western) art, but to the contemporary art of China. Add to this the fact that the show is paired with another, in the Strozzi proper, called China: at the Court of the Emperors, and you'll be forgiven for hearing barbarians at the gate. Which makes these clever exhibitions singly and doubly unmissable: 2,000 years of occidental propaganda, culminating in the recent hype about Chinese contemporary art, have left us with a view of China as inscrutable, hermetic and threatening. Both shows at the Strozzi suggest the opposite.

China: at the Court of the Emperors deals with a millennium of Chinese art, starting with the Eastern Han dynasty in AD25 and ending with the demise of the Tang in AD907. Chinese art history has long seen the fall of the Han in AD220 as an aesthetic disaster - the moment when the purity of early Confucian art was sullied by the barbarous styles and beliefs of Buddhist invaders. A so-called spirit urn of around AD300, excavated in Nanjing, hints at the beginning of the end, its traditional ancestor figures infiltrated by the earliest representations of the Buddha in China.

By judicious borrowing of such little-seen works from provincial museums, The Court of the Emperors re-writes history to show a China not so much groaning under a foreign yoke as joyfully synthesising its influences. By AD400, the hieratic, stylised figures of Han tomb sculpture show the fleshliness that comes from contact with Gupta art, itself possibly influenced by the Greeks. An over-door lunette from a tomb in Xi'an, dated AD579, conflates Zoroastrian and Buddhist emblems, a by-product of trade along the Silk Road. And with these Indian and Persian borrowings came others still further to the west: one tomb, of the Wang family in Xiangshan, contained the Roman glass beaker in this show's fifth room.

In re-writing the Tang as vibrant rather than decadent, this show has provoked suspicion among Chinese historians: there, as here, xenophobia is a by-product of modernity. And yet it reveals a China less impoverished than enriched by its experience of the West. Tang art is no less pure than Han, Indian sensuality slowly reverting to Chinese sensuousness. And the show in the Strozzina, too, suggests a relationship between East and West that is based on give and take.

Where the exhibition upstairs is curated by an Italian, the one in the Strozzi's basement has been left to a trio of Chinese. This was as much a matter of necessity as courtesy: since the night in 1998, evoked in Cina!!!'s first room, when police closed a show of "pornographic" video work in Shanghai, contemporary art in China has redefined itself daily. With friction between official and underground art goes a mingled fear and adulation of the global market; pitched battles over Chinese Pop and "gaudy art" are fought locally and generationally. It is impossible to understand all this from a foreign perspective. Yet Chinese contemporary art is the subject of the West's latest market bubble, work that cost $300 (150) in 1998 now fetching $300,000.

So what we look for from Cina!!! is a set of answers the show studiously refuses to give. And that, maybe, is its point. I can tell you that Shen Shaomin's documentary film, I am Chinese, is set in a village, Hongjiang, whose inhabitants are nationally Chinese but ethnically Russian; that mutual racism has led to in-breeding, which in turn has given the villagers' features a Mongolian cast; that, slowly but surely, the round eyes of Hongjiang are becoming slanted.

What I can't tell you is how to read this story, or what it might mean; or why Shen's work is so peculiarly sad.

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (00 39 055 27 76 461) to 8 June

Copyright c 2008 Independent Newspapers UK Limited. All rights owned or operated by The Independent.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.