Asia Week kicks off on Monday in the midst of a boom in contemporary Chinese art that is having far-reaching effects: It has shifted the business of the major auction houses, changed the lives of Chinese artists, and increased the degree of international exchange in the contemporary art world. Here in New York, it is also transforming the landscape of galleries in Chelsea, with large new spaces opening to exhibit contemporary Asian art.

Contemporary Chinese artists began to attract dealers’ and curators’ attention at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1995 and at the São Paolo Bienal in 1994, but in the last three years the demand, and the prices, have exploded. Worldwide sales of postwar and contemporary Chinese art at Christie’s have risen to $120 million in 2006, from $54 million in 2005 and a mere $18 million in 2004. In the same period, worldwide sales of contemporary Asian art at Sotheby’s have increased to $70 million from less than $3 million.

Works by top artists have appreciated hugely. A painting by Zhang Xiaogang, which sold at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2003 for $76,500, was sold again in London last October for $1,452,000. A month later in Hong Kong, another of his paintings sold at Christie’s for $2.3 million, the record for any living Asian artist.

“The field is galloping,” the owner of Goedhuis Contemporary, which sells contemporary Asian art in New York and London, Michael Goedhuis, said.

Others in the field were quick to emphasize that, while the appreciation has been huge, they did not see it as representing a bubble. “We may be getting a lot of news that’s market-driven, but in fact this art will have real historic merit,” a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie’s, Ingrid Dudek, said.

A curator at the International Center of Photography who has put together several shows of Chinese art, Christopher Phillips, said the boom in Chinese art was part of an overall price surge in the contemporary field: “The Chinese works have gotten so much attention because they started at such a low level and just shot right up, but many of those artists still sell at auction for much less than their European or American counterparts.” In the last two years, he said, the auction houses have showed that there is a client base that will pay high prices for this work. Now, Western museums are in the process of deciding which artists and which works are most important to have in their collections. “I think we’ll start to see the answers to those questions in 12 or 16 months,” Mr. Phillips said.

In the meantime, the rising prices are driving an influx of dealers into the field, and the existing galleries are expanding. Two American dealers, Jack Tilton and Max Protetch, have established outposts in Beijing. Here in New York, Chinese Contemporary Art, a 10-year-old gallery with branches in Beijing and London, recently opened a 3,000-square-foot space on West 24th Street, in the same building where Bodhi Art, a gallery dealing in Indian contemporary art, unveiled a 6,000-square-foot space in September.

A block away, on West 25th Street, a South Korean-owned gallery, Arario, has rented a massive, 20,000-square-foot space that is set to open in September. And dealers in the field said they expect others to arrive soon.

The growing sway of contemporary Asian art has also changed the makeup of the International Asian Art Fair, which opens next Friday at the Seventh Regiment Armory. In the last few years, many of the longtime exhibitors, who deal in older art, have left the fair and chosen instead to mount their Asia Week shows in borrowed gallery spaces on East 57th Street. One of the fair’s organizers, Anna Haughton, attributed the defection to dealers aging, having trouble getting good material, and not wanting to deal with vetting questions about the provenance of cultural artifacts. But one of the dealers who has left, Gisèle Croës, said that exhibiting in a gallery was simply less stressful and less expensive.

In any case, the departing dealers have been replaced — mostly by dealers of contemporary art, including Bodhi Art, Dillon Gallery, and Alexander Gorlizki from New York, Art Miya/Shinseido Co. Ltd. from Tokyo, and Zee Stone Gallery from Hong Kong. “Last year, there was really a buzz in the air, because there were so many young people,” Mrs. Haughton said.

In China, dozens of galleries have popped up to the meet the demand for contemporary art, but a nonprofit cultural infrastructure has been slower to develop. Private museums for contemporary art have begun to be established, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, the Today Art Museum in Beijing, and the soon-to-open Ullens Center for the Arts, founded by the Belgian collector Guy Ullens. Municipal governments, recognizing that contemporary art can be a significant tourist draw, have supported some of these museums. And the national government itself has plans to construct several new museums in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“Part of the reason why so much of the conversation [about Chinese contemporary art] is market-driven is that, in China, the other institutions of the art world have been much slower to evolve,” Ms. Dudek said. “Only in the last year or two has there been this push to develop more of a contemporary art infrastructure on a museum level.”

Most of all, the boom has transformed the lives of artists. Many who emigrated in the 1990s have returned to China, where the cost of production is cheap, and they can put their new riches into doing ambitious work. One émigré, Zhang Huan, has set up a huge factory in Shanghai, where he is making monumental sculptures.

But some observers worry that success has made it harder for successful artists to experiment. “When you are becoming very wealthy, it’s a major struggle for many of the artists to create something new and transform themselves, to really think about what they want to produce,” a specialist in contemporary Asian art at Sotheby’s, Xiaoming Zhang, said.

Mr. Phillips said that, because the Chinese have seen so many reversals in their recent history, “I think there’s an instinct on everybody’s part to capitalize on every opportunity.”

Many artists, he said, are scaling up their production to meet the demand. “If you go the painters’ studios, you see whole teams of assistants who are being supervised and turning out large numbers of canvases, often very much in the style of earlier celebrated works by the same artist,” Mr. Phillips said. “The whole idea of creating an aura of rarity around the work of art, that is not the part of the Chinese mindset right now.”

One peculiarity of the Chinese art scene is that several major artists, including Zhang Xiaogang, manage their careers themselves and do not have exclusive gallery representation. While they sell some work through galleries, they also sell out of their studios or, in some cases, send work directly to auction houses. At a time when dealers are concerned about the auction houses encroaching on their traditional business, the role of auction houses in shaping the market for Asian contemporary art has the potential to elevate tensions.

The influence of the auction houses in the Chinese art market is “just an extreme example of a phenomenon that’s taking place across the whole spectrum of contemporary art,” Mr. Phillips said. “The established galleries are beginning to feel the pressure as artists see the possibility of acting as free agents and pocketing a higher percentage of their sales fees.”

Ms. Dudek acknowledged that “the nature of secondary and primary art markets are changing, especially in the contemporary world,” and that, in Asia, where the art infrastructure is still developing, some artists prefer to sell at auction because of the international attention that auctions draw.

But the attention to Asian contemporary art, including Indian art, which is another growing market, is also stimulating greater international exchange. A Chinese auction house, Beijing Poly International Auction, is holding its first-ever preview in New York next week, exhibiting works from its upcoming spring auction. The sale of contemporary Asian art at Sotheby’s on Tuesday morning promises to draw a mix of American and Asian dealers and collectors. Meg Maggio, of Pékin Fine Arts, just returned to Beijing from the first Gulf Art Fair in Dubai and is preparing to fly to New York with three artists and several Chinese clients. Ms. Maggio said: “For me, it’s become a normal course of events to be in Dubai one week, Beijing the next, New York the next.”