Lorenz Helbling is a very modest man, but that belies considerably immodest achievement. In just ten years his Shanghart Gallery has gone from an itinerant painting shop, scrounging free space from bored foreign hoteliers, to an international powerhouse leading the charge of Chinese artists onto the global scene. Helbling could do this because he shrewdly surfed three great historical waves cresting at the turn of the millennium: the opening-up of China to foreign investment and, more importantly, foreign entrepreneurs; the opening-up of the art world to discourses from beyond the West; and the renaissance of China's regional identities.

Nobody could have imagined this in the 1980s, when Helbling studied art history in Zurich and later Chinese at Shanghai's elite Fudan University. China had relaxed markedly since the demise of the "Gang of Four" but it was a largely poor, rural country. The state still played a heavy role in the economy and foreign investment was limited to problematic prestige projects like Beijing Jeep. There was a burgeoning avant-garde movement, broadly known as the "Culture Fever", culminating with the seminal "China Avant-Garde" show in Beijing, which brought together virtually everyone who would later become big players on the Chinese art scene.

But after June 4th, 1989, a long period of withdrawal and inner exile followed. Many left China. Of those who stayed behind, there were two distinct groups. There were the conceptualists, who retreated to the safety of their "villages" on the outskirts of Beijing. To the degree they were even interested in a market, they were largely supported by a handful of people in Beijing's diplomatic community.

Then there were the painters, labeled by some as "political pop" or "cynical realists". They were much more interested in profiting from selling their work. But this took place entirely outside the context of China. There was no market for their work inside the country, where it was was officially despised (although the artists were more or less left in peace), and no galleries or commercial art dealers of any kind.

Such was the landscape when Helbling arrived in Shanghai in 1995 with the seemingly quixotic idea of opening his own gallery. He had already spent several years in Hong Kong, then a booming market for the so-called "political pop" painters. Few could understand why he would try to set up in the Mainland, where running a commercial art gallery was not even really legal, and in backwater Shanghai.

While the lower Yangtze metropolis had already begun its extraordinary transformation, this wasn't readily apparent in the mid-1990s. Forty years of highly centralized governance had put Beijing squarely at the center of Chinese consciousness. Beijing was where the best and brightest went; where political and cultural debates happened; where almost all the foreigners then living in China resided. Shanghai was then a decrepit city of potholed streets clogged with bicycles, its once-grand mansions mouldering in the summer humidity. Its formerly notorious nightlife was reduced to the Peace Hotel's octogenarian Dixieland jazz band.

But changes were afoot. Deng Xiaoping's 1992 nanxun ("Imperial Tour") had opened the floodgates to unbridled capitalism. Strategic decisions were made not only to open up the South to massive investment from Hong Kong but to build up Shanghai as China's showcase, with an entirely new city on the right bank of the river. It was a radical course in many ways. Not only did it mean committing to opening up the economy to foreigners in every nook and cranny of the country — something totally without precedent in China's long history — and huge gains in personal autonomy, if not political rights, for the citizenry; but it also meant letting go of the oppressive centralization that had characterized the Chinese state for 2000 years. Shanghai was free now to develop its own identity, to become an "international city" with a unique identity based on métissage and openness to the West.

These changes were afoot but just beginning to be felt when Helbling arrived. He managed to skirt the law by registering as a "gift shop" in the foreign-invested Portman Hotel, where he first opened Shanghart in the spring of 1996. With no domestic market, a very specialized foreign one and Shanghai still off the Chinese art world's map, it was a tough start. But Helbling proved to have an exceptional eye. Something was really happening in Shanghai and nobody else was paying attention. He discovered many brilliant artists working in the city, like Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong. The fortunes of the Shanghart gallery would later rise with their fame.

!n 1998, Helbling moved the gallery to a space inside the "Park 97" restaurant complex. That year, his big break came in the form of legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeeman, who was looking for Chinese artists to put in his 1999 Venice Biennale. That Biennale — which introduced many of Helbling's artists to a global audience — was the culmination of a long process, the much-belated opening of the Western-dominated art world to true globalization and discourses from other cultures.

That Biennale marked the tipping point of a trend that began in 1989 with Jean-Hubert Martin's Magiciens de la Terre, the first major museum show to take a truly global view of visual art — including countries as disparate as Nepal and New Guinea. In between you had the emergence of biennials in Gwangju, South Korea and Brisbane, Australia (Asia-Pacific Triennial) and Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru's "Cities on the Move", which opened in Vienna in 1997 in the first of many incarnations.

The 1999 Biennale not only represented an opening to the world but an opening within the Chinese discourse itself. The linear movement of an avant-garde within a tightly knit Beijing scene was fragmenting, and in its place came a greater diversity. These new Shanghai artists — and those Helbling had brought from Beijing, like Zhao Bandi — were much more individualistic, avoiding groupings or movements or other hierarchies. In fact, it's hard to talk about a "scene" when most of Shanghai's artists are not even particularly friendly with each other.

In 2000, Shanghart participated in Art Basel for the first time. Since then, it has become a player on the global market, and its clients include major international collectors. In the last few years, competition has increased as contemporary art becomes normalized and even encouraged by the government. Dozens of galleries have opened all over China. But Shanghart's professionalism and ethics still set it apart from the others and give it access to the best artists' best work.

A few years ago Helbling rented a warehouse in a derelict industrial complex off Moganshan Road. Like many such places in China, it belonged to a state-owned enterprise whose death throes managed to coincide with a huge boom in private enterprise. Artists and galleries and other businesses soon followed. Soon it resembled a smaller version of Beijing's 798. In 2005 Shanghart gave up the location at Park 97 and moved the gallery's offices to Moganshan, at the same time opening a second space within the complex (H Space) to do museum-quality exhibitions.

The emergence of a this "artists neighborhood" helped market Shanghai as a place for art. Beijing was and still is China's cultural center. But that's not the point. Shanghai no longer has to be the capital. No place does. The emergence of a pluralism in the society means multiple centers are possible, and Shanghai is just one of them. There is room for everyone now — even a soft-spoken man from the small Swiss town of Brugg.