By Rebecca Catching

Blue, well almost blue, skies and white fluffy clouds ushered in the first day of ShContemporary, the premier art fair in China and arguably the whole of Asia. In front of the ornate Russian-built Shanghai Exhibition Center, Yang Jiechang's Eurasian Wolf zeppelin soared in the sky, and Zhan Wang's gleaming steel scholar rocks glinted in the sun. Gallerists were smiling too, with most reporting decent sales two days into the fair. But the lead up to Sh was in fact was plagued with problems caused by the government's bureaucratic Great Wall. In other words, it was business as usual.

Works by Zhang Wang and Sopheap Pich. All photos: Rebecca Catching

The catalogues were not ready on exhibition day because offending pages had to be excised, and exhibitors had hassles obtaining visas because of the Olympic season crackdown. Some had to apply twice from different cities and provide letters of recommendation, but most squeezed in eventually.

The bottleneck held up artworks as well as people. Sopheap Pich's bamboo sculptures and Erbossyn Meldibekov's Gattamelata in Ghenghiskhan's Skin, a piece that contained animal hooves, were held in quarantine. Pich's work was released after fumigation while Meldibekov's was still languishing in customs at the time of writing.

Works that made it out of customs were then scrutinized by the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, known colloquially as the 'art police'. Works featuring Mao, nudity and Cultural Revolution imagery came under fire – not for their lack of originality, but for their supposed subversive qualities. German gallerist Michael Schultz was forced to tape over an image of Mao's face in Huang He's Dream Series, a black and white painting which stretched the length of their booth. "Last year we had a very big Mao also from this artist and had no problems," Schultz told me. "At the moment the government is not so friendly because of the Tibet discussion. Before the Olympic games I had the feeling that China was getting more open, but now I feel that it's getting more closed than before."

Parisian gallerist Albert Benamou had about ten pieces censored. When we arrived, Benamou led us covertly around to a small storage room in his booth. He opened the door to reveal photographs by Tian Taiquan of naked women's bodies covered in a mountain of Mao badges.

Also hidden away was Gesture (2003), a large shiny sculpture by the notorious Gao Brothers of a red man, naked, saluting with one hand and holding a golden brick in another. Benamou laughed, "It's not Mao! It's not Mao!" Nevertheless, the work had to be safely confined to the closet. "The art here is very controlled," Gao Zhen, one of the brothers, told me. "Of course we wouldn't see a problem; it's all in their own heads. We showed it in Beijing and had no problem with it. But we've had lots of closures in the past. The problem is that there are no clear guidelines."

But Lorenzo Rudolph, the director of the fair, urged everyone to put the troubles in context. "Don't forget there were these great artists in New York, such as Mapplethorpe, who faced censorship, so we should not focus on it. We should not put China in a corner in regards to censorship."

Still, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye was another who attracted the attention of the cultural police. His proposal to display several pigs tattooed in Disney and Louis Vuitton logos was rejected by the cultural bureau, which said that it didn't consider live animals to be art.

Kai Heinze, director of Faurschou, another gallery at the fair, says such reactions are understandable. "China has a problem with live animals and the problem is with regards to disease outbreaks, especially with SARS. For me I think it would be flat out wrong to say that the government is against art. That is not the case."

Undaunted, Delvoye brought in some even more provocative work, using the fair as a platform for unveiling Tim (2008), a 32-year-old Swiss musician, full name Tim Steiner, who lent his body as a canvas Delvoye's tattoo art. Tim gave regular exhibitions of his back every few hours.

Tim was bought for €150,000 (before the fair), and he's contractually obliged to visit the collector three times a year, and to show himself in exhibitions. Upon his death, the collector has the right to have the tattoo removed from his body.

During the press conference, the temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees when Delvoye discussed the issue of "preservation" of the "work". "Pig skin is really greasy. Tanning a pig skin is very very difficult. A human skin is much more elastic, it's not so greasy, stretches better and the colors will stay."

Just as unsettling was the way the panel alternated between using "it" (the work) and "him" (the person). "Art is always about something that is permanent," Delvoye said. "The art is collected by the collector and will be passed on to children, to the next generation, and will be more interesting in the future. Just like with Tim, the collector has to be patient and wait until Tim… dies. Which we all hope will take him a long time."

Alongside the fair and Delvoye's show-stealing act, the independently curated exhibition Best of Discovery lacked some of the zing of last year, but still offered a couple of excellent videos: Huang Po-Chih's mesmerizing Flo'ver (2006), featuring flowers stretched and pulled into beautiful contortions, and Effie Wu's Super Smile (2007), in which the artist walks around her house with her eyes glued to the camera, in a kind of crazed infatuation.


Works by Wang Zhiyuan and Ma Jun

With a few exceptions, the exhibitors leant towards commercially viable offerings: Warhols and accessible Chinese works such as Ding Yi's fluorescent patterned abstracts and the typical nouveau-Chinoiserie of Yan Peiming's Bruce Lee paintings, Zhang Huan's photographs of chanting comrades and Ma Jun's car painted in traditional patterns.

Shen Shaomin, however, offered one of the most incisive comments on the fair in his piece Kowtow Pumps (2007): oil derricks pumping methodically outside the exhibition center. Here Shen interrogates the insatiable thirst for resources in a globalized world. Like the derricks, the gallerists here are labouring hard to extract great riches from this vast, untapped market.