The nascent economic giant that is China is nudging its way ever more insistently into western consciousness but does it have a distinctive voice? No one would argue against the spectacular growth projections and the sheer weight of numbers that testify to China's growing importance in the world. That is a closed argument by now.

But we seem to want something more. It is a truism that economic posterity is accompanied by cultural prowess. We are conditioned to think that the world's new economic powerhouse should also be its artistic trailblazer - think of Renaissance Florence, or New York at the beginning of the last century.