Thirty masters of Chinese contemporary art, an elite whose works are seldom exhibited together, display their canvases at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, alongside BMWs decorated by masters of Western contemporary art.

The exhibit is titled "Art in Motion: BMW Art Cars Exhibited with Chinese Contemporary Art," and it runs through December 24.

This is the first stop of the BMW Art Car World Tour in China's mainland.

"This theme is twofold," said Victoria Lu, art director at MoCA. "The BMW Art Cars are art on wheels crossing the boundaries of technology and art. And Chinese art is developing hand-in-hand with the international art scene and is constantly in motion."

The artists are the "BMW"s of the contemporary art circle and it's rare to find them at the same exhibition in town - Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong, among others.

Breaking auction records at Christie's, Sotheby's and Guardian's, they represent the power of Eastern art on the global art scene.

Last month, one of Liu Xiaodong's big realistic canvases featuring people migrating away from the site of the Three Gorges project fetched 22 million yuan (US$2.8 million) at auction in Beijing.

A documentary film directed by Jia Zhangke on Liu's process of painting the "Three Gorges" migration was honored at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Liu Xiaodong looks at ordinary people and the realities of their everyday lives. He takes "snapshots" of these people at work, at home, on the bus, in the bathtub or eating dinner.

Their surroundings are industrial landscapes, construction sites, offices and urban centers of modern China. Liu's works transcend the purely personal and address issues like social dislocation and poverty.

Like Liu Xiaodong, his wife Yu Hong also portrays people, mostly herself, her friends and family. By looking at the many small things that build up daily life, she documents the pleasures and pains of ordinary life.

Photography can be a means of fixing a moment in time, preserving memories and facts for the future. And Zhang Xiaogang's famous "bloodline" series, which appears like black-and-white photographs, preserve his subjects as if they were sitting for photographs.

Typically they show parents and children, silently staring at the viewer with black button-like eyes, their narrow elongated faces and melancholic expressions evoke the feelings of times past.

Zhang uses a painting technique that produces an even surface without noticeable brushstrokes as if to remove his personality from the painting and create a smooth photograph-like surface.

This year, one of Zhang's photo portrait-like-paintings sold for US$1 million in the West, demonstrating the fever for Chinese contemporary art.

The exhibition covers contemporary art over two decades, including "From Social Realism to Expressive Individualism," "From Romanticism to the Shangri-la of Memory," "The Systems and Propagation of Visual Signs," "Neo-Literati Art," "Material Experimentation and Multimedia Art" and "Conceptualism and Crossover.'

The "BMW Art Cars" makes it possible to see so many works by big-name artists.

Of course, the center pieces of the show are four BMWs: a 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL painted by Alexander Calder, a 1990 BMW 535i by Mulazo Kayama, a 1995 BMW 850 CSi by David Hockney and a 1999 BMW V12 LMR by Jenny Holzer.

Date: through December 24, 10am-6pm
Address: Gate 7, People's Park, 231 Nanjing Rd. W.
Tel: 021-6327-9900