The Chinese art market has enjoyed more attention than ever as Chinese collector Liu Yiqian forked over $170 million for a Modigliani nude painting this November, but few know that such record high sales account for less than 1/200 of the total sale of Chinese art and antiques when the domestic art market was at its prime.

According to a report issued by China's Ministry of Culture, transactions in the Chinese art market topped all countries in 2011 with a total volume of $35 billion, making up 30 percent of the global art market revenue.

This achievement, though stunning, was unsurprising in the eyes of some art collection professionals. "As the cultural expression of a country that plays a central role in the world today, both economically and politically, Chinese art has naturally come to the attention of art collectors," said Jay Levenson, Director of the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art.

Despite such interest, China's auction market suffered a sharp downturn in 2012 amid a global slump in demand for Chinese art, fueled partly by concern about the many fakes that are offered for sale. This year, the sale of Chinese art and antiques has rebounded modestly, and expert confidence in the Chinese art market reported by ArtTactic is up by 21 percent, only 9 percent below the peak in May 2011.

Wu Hong, director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, said that despite turbulence in the art market, the Chinese market is beginning to take things in its own stride. "Future Chinese art historians may view the year 2000 as a turning point, the previous 40 years were politically oriented while the years after were basically market oriented," Wu said.

Earlier this month, Levenson, together with other experts in the field of art management, lectured on the topic to their Chinese counterparts and art management enthusiasts in Beijing. Levenson shared with us his take on contemporary Chinese art and what it means to the world. He also gave suggestions on how contemporary Chinese art can be seen, heard and felt by a global audience. Below are excerpts from the interview.

Which Chinese exhibitions or performances have made their way to MoMA? How were they chosen?

Chinese artists have participated in three of MoMA's "Projects" series of exhibitions. Xu Bing designed one of the banners in "Projects 70: Banners I." Song Dong's "Waste Not" was the subject of "Projects 90: Song Dong." And Yin Xiuzhen's "Collective Subconscious" was the subject of "Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen." These projects were the result of first-hand curatorial travel to China, and making studio, museum, and gallery visits there.

But works by Chinese artists have also appeared in other MoMA group or thematic exhibitions. For example, Cai Guo-Qiang's "Borrowing your Enemy's Arrows" has been in the collection since 1999 and is currently on view at MoMA, and in 2003 he was commissioned to create a fireworks piece, "Transient Rainbow," to mark the museum's temporary relocation to Queens. And our curators of course have an ongoing interest in what is happening in Chinese art.

Does MoMA have certain criteria in introducing non-native arts? If so, what are they?

MoMA has always been a museum of international art, not a nationally-oriented collection of American art. Its original collections in the 1930s focused mainly on French art, since Alfred Barr, the Museum's founding director, considered French artists to be in the vanguard of modern art, but even then it collected works by American and Mexican artists, as well, with the understanding that all works in the collection had to be of the highest quality, in the judgment of the curators responsible for acquisitions.

MoMA has also collected art from Asian countries for some time, though principally from Japan and always on a smaller scale than its Western art collections. The standards for acquisitions and exhibitions are the same for all artists, regardless of national origin: quality and historical importance, in the view of the curators.

Originally, Barr saw the history of modern art as a series of avant-garde movements, groups of innovative artists who succeeded one another and changed the course of the development of modern art. MoMA's curators work today with an understanding that modernism developed in different parts of the world at different times and that those later modernisms are as worthy of study as the earlier movements that took place in Western Europe.

What does contemporary Chinese art mean to the world? What does the world want to see in Chinese art?

I think the world outside China is especially interested in Chinese art as the cultural expression of a country that plays a central role in the world today, both economically and politically. Viewers outside China, many of whom have never traveled there, would like to understand the country better and see the visual arts as a means to do that. Of course, while there are some Chinese artists who are directly concerned with presenting Chinese culture and interpreting contemporary events in their art, there are others who focus much more on aesthetic issues, on the history of art itself, and it is important for foreign audiences to understand that Chinese art is more than simply a window onto contemporary Chinese history.

In the eyes of Chinese and Western societies, does China have mainstream art and mainstream artists?

Some Chinese artists are definitely regarded in both China and the West as figures whose work belongs to world art history, not only China's, and in some cases, the prices of their works have risen to very high levels, accordingly. But I would be very careful about judging artists' importance simply by the prices their works command in the art market. Dealers and collectors are not always the best judges of lasting artistic importance. The judgment of curators and scholars is much more significant, though it does not always affect market prices.

Do you think the soaring price of Chinese art will have an impact on MoMA's Chinese contemporary art collection? If so, how?

The high market prices for the works of well-known contemporary Chinese artists certainly make it more difficult for American museums in general, not merely MoMA, to expand their collections, but that is a problem that museums encounter in any popular area. Museums in the United States often look to private donors for support in making acquisitions of works of art with high prices.

When it comes to cooperating with international art institutions, do you think strategies vary according to the scale and the type of the institutions?

Different types of international museums necessarily look for different types of international partnerships. Private museums like MoMA generally try to find individual museums with which to cooperate on a museum-to-museum basis.

What kind of talent is needed for art institutions that desire to go global? Can you talk about the qualifications required in such talents?

For a museum to be truly global—that is, both to collect art internationally and to create an international exhibition program—museums need international expertise. Their programs must be designed by curators who are knowledgeable about art from all the regions of the world that the museum wants to represent. It is important for an international museum to develop networks of contacts in other countries, so that it has access to expertise outside the museum if there is no specialist curator on its own staff.

What are the common themes curators in China and in Western countries share? And how do they vary? What are the gaps that need to be bridged in order to make each other heard?

The leading curators in China have international experience, and I do not think there are significant differences between the types of exhibitions they present and the shows seen in other countries. They organize both exhibitions of individual artists, broader historical shows, and exhibitions focused on more limited historical periods. I have certainly seen shows in China that could be presented in American museums without significant changes. It would be useful at this stage in the development of Chinese museums for more Chinese curators to develop international knowledge, either by studying or working in other countries.