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Talk about giving the authorities the finger. In 1989, shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, a young Chinese photographer named Sheng Qi took a blade and, in a ghastly and nauseating act of defiance, lopped off the little finger of his left hand. He then buried the severed digit in a flowerpot, showed the communist leadership his backside and headed off to exile in Rome.

“He wanted to make a statement but also wanted to make sure a piece of himself always remained in China,” says Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. “Not many people are going to make that kind of sacrifice for their art.”

Sheng’s best-known work, a photographic triptych of his maimed hand holding wallet-size portraits of himself as a child, his mother and Mao Zedong, is part of an exhibit called Whispering Wind: Recent Chinese Photography, which opens Friday at the Frist and runs through Oct. 7. It’s part of a collaborative venture that will also feature another show at the Frist (Lyrical Traditions: Four Centuries of Chinese Painting From the Papp Collection) along with exhibits of Chinese art at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and the Nashville Public Library.

Whispering Wind provides a prismatic, digital picture of the artistic revolution that’s been going on in the world’s most populous country since the end of the Cultural Revolution. China’s newfound freedoms and economic might have fueled a cultural boom, and Chinese artists have responded to this renaissance with works that push the boundaries of technology, taste and even sanity.

Sheng’s “Memories: Me, Mom and Mao” represents the extreme end of the sanity spectrum, but it’s hardly the only disturbing image. Zhang Huan’s “Family Tree” inflicts immediate discomfort with its graphic depiction of hidebound traditionalism vs. the individual.

The work consists of nine picture panels of Zhang’s face, with the face in each subsequent panel covered with more and more Chinese calligraphy. In the final photo, Zhang’s face is completely covered with ink, his humanity almost nearly blacked out. “Only the eyes remain uncolored, and they stare back at you in defiance,” says Scala.

Weird and disturbing images aside, it’s important to note that contemporary Chinese photography isn’t only about taking pictures. It’s also about using the latest digital technology to create images that are as imaginative (and often as illusory) as anything in a Salvador Dali painting.

Li Shan, for instance, creates images that at first look like beautiful lotus flowers. On closer inspection, though, they reveal themselves as bizarre genetic freaks, flowers with human hair and tissue. Xing Danwen, meanwhile, finds a different way of distorting reality, such as photoshopping herself into pictures of fancy urban condos.

“She seems to be creating a visual fantasy world,” says Scala.

You won’t find anything as risky as Li Shan or Xing Danwen in Frist’s other show, Lyrical Traditions, though the 60 works in that exhibit are no less exciting, if for no other reason than their sheer beauty. These pieces—scroll paintings, albums of illustrated poetry and decorative fans—come primarily from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911 and pronounced “ching”) dynasties, and almost all of them show a Taoist reverence and preoccupation with nature. (Landscapes abound in this show.)

Shen Zhou’s “Enjoying the Mid-Autumn Moon in the Bamboo Villa,” a handscroll, dates from 1486 and is the oldest piece in the show. It’s a deceptively simple pastoral scene, etched out in black and white, but it is revered for its immediacy and expressive depth. Interestingly, Shen would have been considered an amateur in his day. He was what the Chinese referred to as an artist-scholar—an artist who sketched out works quickly and with the spontaneity of an improvisation.

“Artists like Shen Zhou weren’t trying to create exact likenesses,” says Katie Delmez, a curator of the exhibit. “They were trying to express their emotions, and in China artists who created that kind of expressive art had more prestige. The professional court artists were the ones who used color and created exact likenesses, but that was considered a less elevated form of art.”

“The court artists were creating works that were the equivalent of Escher prints,” says Tracy Miller, a professor of art history at Vanderbilt University. “Those works were like graphic designs and were not considered higher art forms.”

And yet, one fascinating aspect of Chinese art is the lofty place it reserves for the most famous of Eastern graphic design—Chinese calligraphy. Almost all of the scrolls in both the Frist and Vanderbilt exhibits are decorated with calligraphy. In most cases, the symbols spell out a poem relating to the painting on the scroll. (The Chinese referred to this combination of poetry, calligraphy and painting as the “Three Perfections,” and a painted scroll usually needed all three elements to be deemed worthy art. It was a holistic approach to creation that has few equivalents in Western art aside from perhaps 19^th century European opera, with its synthesis of music, poetry, movement and design.)

“It’s fair to say that Chinese artists were not like the Dutch masters, and they did not see art as being only about painting,” says Vanderbilt’s Miller.

Actually, as the Vanderbilt exhibit makes clear, Chinese art often served practical and even transcendental purposes. Some of the earliest items at the exhibit—which features scroll paintings, ancestral portraits and Buddhist art—date from the Neolithic period (6000 to 2000 B.C.) and were used as funeral items. These were jade, bronze and ceramic figures that were buried with the dead. The artifacts—lacquer drinking cups, perfume containers, reproductions of attendants on horseback and so on—were the things deceased Chinese leaders would need in the afterlife.

“In the very least, all of this shows that people in Neolithic China were preoccupied with questions of death and immortality,” says Joseph Mella, director of the Vanderbilt gallery.

On the other hand, Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang, who has a show at the Nashville Public Library, is more concerned with the here-and-now, and in particular with quality-of-life issues and human rights. Born in Hunan Province in 1941, Huang spent 12 years in Chinese labor camps and prisons. His poetry, which was fiercely critical of the Cultural Revolution, was once officially banned in China. Now living in exile in America, Huang will be at the Main Library’s Fine Art Gallery this week, inscribing his poetry and calligraphy on the walls.

“Huang Xiang spent his whole life standing up for human rights in China,” says Liz Coleman, coordinator of the library’s gallery. “It’s humbling to have a man like that here.”