"Beijing is a city a lot of artists move to, and they have pressure: they left their village, or left their home town, and have only a little time in which to succeed. There are thousands of artists, it is very competitive. Who is good is measured by who has the biggest car. Shanghai artists discuss a lot, but are not that into money or who has the biggest house,” Helbling explains. “In Shanghai, the artists and galleries here were not so easily absorbed. The boom was a lot of people accumulating works and pushing up prices, and most Shanghai artists refused to participate. One reason is that Shanghai is a commercial city – if people want to be artists, they’ll be artists. If they want to make money, they’ll make money.”

“Shanghai was not so impacted,” concurs Alexia Dehaene, who directs the Shanghai non-profit BizArt Center, established in 1999. She and Helbling both point out that Shanghai has experienced a strange quiet during the Chinese art boom, its growth steady but low key, and with new institutions in recent years limited to the ShContemporary art fair, launched in 2007, and the August opening of the Minsheng Museum. “Beijing is more active, much bigger, more complex … People say Shanghai is more commercial, but during the boom Beijing was way more commercial than Shanghai.”

Beijing’s comparative commercialisation is only one of the urban stereotypes the double bubble inverted. Starting with the opening of Arario Beijing in 2005, the capital has seen an explosion of branches of big international galleries, and increasingly attracts artists from outside of China. It has assumed Shanghai’s traditional mantle of Sino-Foreign arbiter, while Shanghai art remains comparatively introspectively Chinese.

“Shanghai is painfully local,” critiques Meg Maggio, who co-founded Beijing’s Courtyard Gallery in 1997 and launched Pekin Fine Arts in 2005. “Beijing has become the centre for contemporary art not just for China but for all of Asia,” she enthuses “The city has become a wonderful platform for Asian artists, curators and galleries, as well as artists from around China … I don’t know what the ‘Chinese Art Scene’ means; it is this constant conversation with the world. Chinese art has become less inward looking.”

The inaugural private 798 Beijing Biennale, running until 12 September, is premised upon Beijing’s post-boom repositioning as an international art hub for Asia. Materials for the event stay rigorously on-message, declaring Beijing, “ideal for this unique biennale because it is a megalopolis located between the future and the past – a confluence of the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern that, in turn, reconfigures globalisation in a manner more complicated and multidimensional than in other areas of the world” and making much of the inclusion of Beijing-based foreign artists. The open question is whether that trend will continue even as China’s trendiness subsides, and as international galleries’ expansion budgets contract with the global art market.

If Shanghai, and nearby sister city Hangzhou, were shielded in their own bubble of distance from the Beijing-based boom, the sky was higher and the emperor even further away in Southern China. The Guangzhou Triennial debuted in 2002, and in its three installments to date has consistently been heralded as the best official art event in China. The same year, independent gallery Vitamin Creative Space opened in Guangzhou, and it has become the centre of a flourishing, largely experimental scene. More galleries have opened in nearby Shenzhen.