A traveler arriving in Beijing in search of art is sure to be struck first by the size of the city’s enormous squares, temples, galleries, and museums—which corresponds in contemporary art to the prevalence of room-filling
installations, large-format pictures, and, until recently, high prices paid for works of art. “Small Is the New Big” is the title curator Pauline J. Yao gave in 2009 to an article in which she differentiated the work of the Arrow Factory—a noncommercial exhibition space she has been running with artist colleagues Rania Ho and Wang Wei since 2008—from the hype of contemporary