Many artists of the new generation are eschewing all that. They include Zhao Zhao, who cuts cubes out of antique Buddhist statues; Cao Fei, a video and digital-media artist concerned with urban decay; and Guo Hongwei, who arranges tiny piles of concrete ash, decorates empty rooms in colorful streaks, and paints intricate collections of birds, rocks, and leaves. This more conceptual art of “post-80s” or “post-90s” Chinese artists, named for the decades in which they were born, tends to reflect 21st-century themes such as urban malaise and the digital era, rather than narrowly Chinese concerns, including political ones.

Indeed, the shift coincides with diminishing space for free expression since the late aughts, when government authorities blocked various foreign social-media websites and intensified their cultural censorship. Ai, who the Chinese government has scrutinized for years, sustained a head injury when harassed by state security officers in 2009, after creating a work that commemorated the thousands of children who died in shoddily-constructed buildings during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. And the government’s heavy-handedness has only increased since Xi Jinping became president in 2013. In late 2014, speaking at a cultural forum in Beijing, Xi said that art should serve the people and socialism and “be like sunlight in a blue sky” and like “a cool spring breeze.” His language evoked a famous speech by Mao at the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, in which Mao said “there is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake ... art that is detached from or independent of politics.”

Ai has expressed “total disappointment” in the young artists who avoid political art, suggesting that they are caving to government pressure. Those artists insist that’s not the case: “In China, everything reflects the circumstances of Chinese society,” He told me during a visit together to his hometown, near Dandong, on China’s border with North Korea. “But we need to be more thoughtful and flexible about it.” (His differences with Ai go back to before his recent artistic evolution: One of his works from 2011, “The Death of Marat,” is a fiberglass sculpture of Ai’s corpse lying facedown on an exhibition-hall floor.)

To be sure, political pressure from the Chinese government is not the only factor that has influenced Chinese art. Another key element is the market, which drives artistic creation more than some purists would like to imagine. Many Western buyers still favor politically provocative work from China, but many of them have expanded their notion of what Chinese art can be—that is, art for art’s sake rather than relevant to China and its politics alone. “Ten years ago there was a tendency to read Chinese art as a direct commentary on Chinese sociopolitical conditions,” Philip Tinari, the director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, said. “Now there is more appetite to look at it as aesthetic practice.” New wealth in China has also led to a rising number of Chinese art collectors who don’t want political art about their nation, or are afraid to own it. “There is no Chinese contemporary art,” Tinari said. “There is just art made by Chinese artists.”