Two artists, Sun Xun and Zhou Tao, use video to explore China’s industrialization and environmental degradation. Mr. Sun’s “Mythological Time” is a surreal, at times overweening animation set in his northern hometown, Fuxin, which was once home to the largest open-pit coal mine in Asia. Scenes of tanks, miners, fossils and mountains give way to compelling dream sequences, one of which features fishermen hauling a colossal carp beached like a whale. Disconnected vistas scroll across the long screen, recalling the axonometric compositions of Chinese landscapes, though the gruff, energetic paintings that line the walls of the darkened gallery recall the vigorous work of William Kentridge even more than the literati style of classical Chinese art.

Mr. Zhou’s disquieting two-channel video “Land of the Throat,” by contrast, is shot in the south of China: specifically, the Pearl River Delta, the first region of the country oriented to hypercapitalist production in the era of Deng Xiaoping. “Land of the Throat” roams abandoned or sullied sites around Guangzhou and Shenzhen, avoiding character and plot in favor of wordless, melancholy shots that cohere into a lurid dreamscape. A barefoot man trudges across acres of mud; a turtle bobs up out of brackish water. A parched brown landscape is bisected with red-and-white caution tape, and hills have been eroded so badly they appear like wrinkled skin. Mr. Zhou’s Pearl River Delta is a sci-fi dystopia with no need of special effects, an update of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” for a century of ecological crisis.

If “Tales of Our Time” and its bank-backed predecessors serve as initial maneuvers to broaden the museum’s collection, then I’m prepared to see these shows’ geographic straitjackets as necessary evils. And the Guggenheim is indeed planning to present a more global cross-section of modern and contemporary art — in Abu Dhabi, where its controversial planned satellite museum, 12 times the size of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral museum in Manhattan, will place art from after 1960 in a worldwide framework.

As for New York, “Tales of Our Time” and the museum’s coming China megaexhibition offer a welcome opportunity to reckon with art we still see too infrequently. I hope, though, that we start to see more solo shows by the likes of Mr. Zhou, as well as thematic exhibitions that let us appreciate him as more than just a national ambassador.