Yue Minjun enjoys laughing at the world. He paints himself on canvas - a group of Yue laughing during military exercises, laughing while flying on backs of geese and laughing at historic world events.

The 44-year-old has a reason to laugh in the real world now. His painting, A Giggling Yue Dressed as A Pope, sold for 2.14 million pounds, or more than 30 million yuan ($4.3 million) at Sotheby's London auction in June, setting a new record for Chinese contemporary art piece.

The last record holder is Liu Xiaodong, whose painting The New Migrants of the Three Gorges sold for 22 million yuan ($2.9 million) at Beijing Poly International Auction in November 2006.

Chinese contemporary art has taken off in the international art world. Yue is not the only Chinese avant-garde artist selling at international auctions. Others include Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Liu Xiaodong and Yang Shaobin.

The rise of Chinese contemporary art took many by surprise. Just 20 years ago, today's big-name artists were described by their neighbors as "mang liu", or jobless loafers, moving from their hometowns to illegally live in big cities such as Beijing.

To escape their neighbors' distrustful eyes during the early 1990s, many artists moved to a village near Yuanmingyuan in a northern suburban Beijing, where the rents were lower and they could live as a group.

"We were a headache for local police, who thought we were troublemakers. They just didn't want us to live there (Yuanmingyuan) but had no reason to get rid of us, so they kept coming to our homes. It was hard to concentrate on painting," recalls Yue, in his spacious studio in Songzhuang in eastern Beijing.

Like Yue, many artists are now living in Songzhuang, of Tongzhou District, after leaving Yuanmingyuan in the early 1990s. It is estimated that about 1,500 artists from all over the country have moved to Songzhuang since 1994, taking the town as their home. The town has become a leading base for Chinese contemporary art.

"You can't imagine how life has changed," says Yang Wei, a leading art critic who came to public attention with his sarcastic paintings of the People's Bank of China.

"If our electricity meter is broken, the local authority immediately sends people to repair it. In the past, they would have tried to drive us away."

Chinese contemporary art has blossomed since 1979 after China's reforms and opening to the world. It sprang from long years of isolation from the international contemporary art scene.

Few aspects of modern Chinese life better characterize the nation's continental drift away from its collective past to a more individualistic future.

"The country's management mode has changed. During the planned economy era, it was the elite powers who decided what people should do and say," Yue recalls.

"People should all make steel, because the country needed steel or should weave cloth because of a shortage of cloth. Society was run from top to bottom.

"Now, a lot of creation starts from an individual. The creation grows and then gets accepted by the mainstream and changes the society's thinking, just like Chinese contemporary art's trajectory."

Contemporary art has transformed the country's physical landscape, too.

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