In 1981, a 24-year-old artist called Ai Weiwei left Beijing for New York, telling his mother he would become "the new Picasso". In the 1980s he made edgy works such as "Safe Sex" - a rubber raincoat with a condom for a pocket - before returning home in the 1990s as agent provocateur for the young sensationalist Chinese art emerging from the post-Mao reform era. His talent for generating controversy reached an apogee in 2000 when he curated a hugely influential, chaotic off-biennale Shanghai show that included the artist Zhu Yu eating aborted foetuses in public, after which performance art in China was banned. A disappointed Mrs Ai looked on. "Shetold me: 'If you're really the new Picasso, then he can't have been half the artist he's cracked up to be,'" Ai later recalled.

Like Mrs Ai, the fatigued west has been dreaming of a Chinese Picasso for two decades. Chinese art has ambition, monumentality, inventiveness, an ability to shock and an acute, troubled responsiveness to the most rapidly changing society in human history. But how good and enduring is it? It is certainly being gobbled up at auction by western and Chinese buyers alike, and paraded round the world like a performing monkey. Mahjong, the un-rivalled private collection of the former Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg, toured to Hamburg this year and is now en route to the Salzburg Festival and Rio de Janeiro. Charles Saatchi replies with a Chinese exhibition in the summer, while the collector Frank Cohen's show of Chinese paintings opened last week. Meanwhile in Liverpool, The Real Thing, Tate's first show of 21st-century Chinese work, claims an authenticity and scope unmatched so far in a British survey.