What does a makeover of 5,000 years of culture feel like? Ask China, because that's what's happening there. Ancient cities are coming down; new ones are going up. Urban markets are spilling over with Western-style products. To a sizable segment of a youth-heavy population, the Cultural Revolution is a phantom, the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, yesterday's inexplicable news.

Such developments may register only casually on Western attention. But the reality is that as China is transformed, the rest of the world will be transformed. The effects may be slow to unfold, even for China's still predominantly agricultural society, but they will be profound. You can bank on that.

''Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China,'' a perspective-altering show at both the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society, gives a panoramic glimpse of the continuing cultural revolution after the Cultural Revolution. It is the first such glimpse New York has had since Asia Society's 1998 survey, ''Inside/Out: New Chinese Art,'' for which the new show provides a historical update.
The history in question began a few years after Mao Zedong's death, in 1976, when China expanded its contact with the West. Overnight, it seemed, a generation of young artists, many of whom were trained in classical painting and calligraphy but reached maturity during the implacable heyday of Socialist Realism, gained access to Western art, all of it, old and new.

They went wild, scrambling through styles, ideas and forms with a kind of raucous, guerrilla energy. What resulted was less a New Wave than a series of avant-gardist firecrackers going off: big bang, little bang, silence, huge bang and so on. Political Pop painting in the 1980's was like a Socialist Realism in reverse, with Coke bottles instead of Little Red Books. Installation art had a tremendous impact: it was cheap to make, required no special training and embraced all other forms, including performance.

Photography and video had similar advantages, the former, in particular, being easy to show and conceptually versatile: it could imitate painting, adapt to installations or just be itself. Most important, photography's dual capacity for recording and inventing reality made it the ideal medium for an era of experimentation, chaotic variety and whiplash change.

Variety is instantly and somewhat disorientingly evident at Asia Society, where the smaller segment of ''Between Past and Future'' is so tightly installed that intended thematic divisions are hard to see. But one of these sections, ''History and Memory,'' picks up more or less where ''Inside/Out'' left off with images that make provocative references to cultural and political monuments. The Great Wall, for example, becomes a stage for a nude performance by the androgynous artist Ma Liuming, captured in photographs and on video. And the totemic Tiananmen Square portrait of Mao is shot by the Gao brothers (Gao Qiang and Gao Zhen) from directly below, so it looks like a guillotine blade descending.

Mao appears elsewhere, too, as do hints of the kind of political oppression associated with his name. In three pictures, Sheng Qi photographs his own left hand holding a snapshot: one of himself as a child, one of his mother and one of Mao. What's arresting, though, is the fact that the little finger of the hand is missing. The artist cut it off in a gesture of protest before going into political exile at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

In a remarkable portrait series by Hai Bo, images come in pairs. The earlier picture in each pair, often a group shot of family or friends, dates from the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), while the second, taken recently, records the artist's attempt to reassemble the original sitters. In some cases, he has been successful: the same faces, now aged, are there. In others, empty chairs speak of lives lost and fates unknown.

Violence, implied in these pictures, becomes theatrically explicit in a second thematic section, ''Reimagining the Body.'' The nude figure, with its erotic potential, carries a disconcerting charge in the context of Chinese classic art, from which it is all but absent. And for that reason, and others, rebellious young Chinese artists have made much of it.

It is presented with a kind of show-bizzy flair in a 1995 shot by Rong Rong of the charismatic artist Zhang Huan, seen bound and bleeding in a performance he gave at the now-demolished artists' enclave on the outskirts of Beijing called the East Village. Along with other figures who emerged as stars from that scene, he gave self-torture an aggrandizing glamour.

By contrast, in so-called conceptual photography, the body plays a supporting role to ideas, literally so in Huang Yan's landscapes painted directly onto his torso. Here he presents himself as a physical vehicle of cultural memory and at the same time alludes to a connection between photography and painting.

The body as a malleable social and personal emblem is the subject of ''Performing the Self,'' the first of the two superbly installed thematic sections at International Center of Photography, where there's room for the show to really open up. A funny, needling video by Cao Fei -- one of the show's youngest artist and one of its unusually high number of women -- is set in a corporate office, though the performers are made up to look like a cross between humans and dogs. Lin Tianmiao, now in her early 40's, turns a self-portrait in which she appears with her head shaved like a Buddhist nun or an extraterrestrial into a towering photographic apparition anchored to the material world only by strings of yarn.
Old and new converge yet again in portraiture. The genre was a vital feature of classical painting, just as it is in Wang Qingsong's photographic remake of the renowned 10th-century scroll ''Night Revels of Han Xizai.'' In the new, digitally printed edition, Song dynasty court officials are replaced by a Beijing art-world nobility, which includes the esteemed critic and curator Li Xianting and the much-noticed Mr. Wang himself, a former painter whose history-baiting tableau-vivant photographs blend farce, nostalgia and world-weariness in proportions that are hard to gauge.

All kinds of contradictory emotions are mixed in the show's final section, ''People and Place,'' where the sense of traumatic change in China is most graphic. Many pictures are of architecture. Wang Jinsong punctuates hundreds of black-and-white snapshots of bland modernistic facades with a few color pictures of the old buildings that survive. Zhang Dali chips a human profile out of the walls of half-demolished structures, as if to give them faces.

And in a remarkable video by Song Dong -- as outstanding here as he was in ''Inside/Out'' -- the artist holds in his hands sheets of paper onto which video images of modern Shanghai are projected. And every few minutes he abruptly crumples the sheets into a ball. The gesture is jolting every time, as if some terrorist god were obliterating a city as fast as it is built.

Other architectural images are more idealistic, as in the case of Xing Danwen's dreamy filmstrips of Beijing and Xiong Wenyun's stirring shots of humble roadside houses in Tibet that she fitted with cloth hangings the color of the Buddhist rainbow. But a sense of vitality comes only in images of people.

It's certainly there in pictures by the hot young artist Zheng Guogu of slacker-punk teenagers, for whom a Westernized China is the only China they know, and in Yang Yong's steamily noirish fashion shots. Bai Yilou's hand-stitched collage of photographic portrait negatives suggests the dense, roiling diversity of China's population, in which everyone is at once unique and anonymous. Such diversity becomes at once exhilarating and wrenching in the series titled ''The Chinese'' by Liu Zheng. For several years this tireless artist traveled the country taking pictures of people old and young, poor and rich, living and dead. The complete series has just been published as a book, which I unreservedly recommend.

I also recommend the exhibition catalog. It has solid essays by the show's organizers, Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography, and Wu Hung, consulting curator at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, supplemented by artists' statements and interviews that are a revelation.

Among other things, they spell out the practical reasons for the popularity of photography and video -- media out of fashion in New York -- among non-Western artists. They also demonstrate how refined, after rough-and-ready beginnings, the approach to these media has become in China within just a few years. Video in particular seems poised for a great leap forward, and on the evidence of work by Xu Zhen, Song Dong, Wang Jianwei and Cao Fei, its prospects look bright.

Finally, the artists in the catalog just sound different from those in the West, whether they are expressing longing for a culture perceived as lost or mingled excitement and exasperation about the one that confronts them in China today. No one ventures statements of political protest; China is still a dangerous place for dissidents. But a critical sensibility is implicit in almost every word spoken -- and in almost every piece of art, just as it has been in Chinese art over thousands of years.

Indeed, the ties between contemporary and traditional Chinese art and culture, unsuspected only a few years ago, are apparent now. Whether the next new generation will sustain and nurture them remains to be seen. But the dynamic they are producing today -- or at least when this show was selected -- is both elastic and finely tuned.
Its spirit is distilled in a photographic triptych titled ''Tianyuan Space Station, 12 December 2000'' by Li Tianyuan.

In the central panel the artist himself appears, a blurred figure in front of a Beijing high-rise, staring up at the sky. The left panel is a satellite shot, supposedly of the very spot he is standing on, filmed from 500 miles above the earth. In the right panel is a microscopic closeup of a tiny section of his body, a fingernail. City and self, reality and fantasy, awesomeness and absurdity -- these are the active, volatile ingredients of Chinese art at the moment, and they give a vital, graspable shape to this important show.

''Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China'' remains on view at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, and at the Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 288-6400, through Sept. 5. The show then travels to the Smart Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (Oct. 2 to Jan. 16), to the Seattle Art Museum (Feb. 10 to May 15), to Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (March to May 2006) and to the Santa Barbara Art Museum in California (summer 2006).