BEIJING — China has pushed to the cutting edge of the world’s modern art scene, overtaking New York and other Western art centers, the owners of a top American gallery declared as they opened a cavernous new space here this weekend in advance of the Olympics.

“I think the new art in China is much more exciting than the new art in New York or London or Germany,” Arnold Glimcher of PaceWildenstein said Saturday as he unveiled the 22,000-square-foot gallery in a booming Beijing art enclave known as the 798 District. “The true art in the international world of real significance is coming from China,” he said.

Since 2004, galleries based in Italy, Denmark, and Korea have opened small spaces in Beijing. Just last year, a Manhattan-based specialist in Chinese works, Chambers Fine Art, set up an outpost here. However, PaceWildenstein is the first major Western gallery with the pull to showcase top Western artists and top Chinese artists, especially those who produce large works.

“It’s not the first. It’s the biggest,” the newly hired chief of PaceWildenstein’s Beijing operation, Leng Lin, said. “Up to now, no one gallery can compare to Pace for history or quality and power.”

In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Glimcher described the decision to open in Beijing as an impulsive one that grew out of the gallery’s courtship of a Chinese artist known for his interpretations of highly formal Chinese family photos, Zhang Xiaogang.

“He’s the iconic artist of China and the artist who has probably reached the highest levels of the auction market, but also a really unique original vision of China,” Mr. Glimcher said. “Most of his paintings are like passport photographs. They’re called bloodline paintings.”

The gallery was also eager to sign a Chinese performance artist, Zhang Huan, one of whose early works involved covering his naked body with honey, fish oil and flies in a public toilet. “If Zhang Xiaogang is the Johns of China, Zhang Huan is the Rauschenberg. Just somebody who is a great performance artist who every day has a new style. This is a very methodical kind of introspective artist,” Mr. Glimcher said. “It is very much like that parallel.”

Mr. Glimcher said the new Chinese art is edgy because artists are still struggling to come to terms with the country’s new openness and the lingering pain of the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the artistic class and destroyed much of China’s cultural heritage. “Western figurative art at this moment in history has very little narrative or meaning. It’s tweaking,” the art dealer and movie producer said. “This is all about their narrative….It’s very, very pertinent and it’s very exciting. They’re making art because they have to. There’s real meaning to this art.”

As impressive as the new Beijing gallery is, new visitors are likely to be more astounded by the bustling crowds that descend on the 798 District every weekend. Thousands of Chinese, most of them in their 20s, pack the sprawling streets and alleys to peer at the latest art.

“It’s extraordinary, extraordinary, the activity here,” Guy Wildenstein told the Sun. “It’s like a whole town, an art town, an art city. The youth is amazing here and the feeling of power, interest, the will to learn, the will to expand, the energy.”

“It makes Chelsea look provincial,” the gallery’s chief spokeswoman and Mr. Glimcher’s daughter-in-law, Andrea Glimcher, said. The gallery’s first show, “Encounters,” pairs artworks from Asia and the West. Future shows will involve Chuck Close and Mark Rothko, as well as Chinese artists, Mr. Glimcher said.

Like other buildings in the 798 District, the new gallery is part of a former military-run electronics factory designed by East Germans in the 1950s. “That is the best sort of raw building I’ve ever seen,” the architect for the new space, Richard Gluckman of Manhattan, said. “The arches with the north-facing skylights are better than something Louis Kahn had done…. My approach to a space like that was to do as little as possible.”

Pace Wildenstein’s Beijing effort is aimed at building trust with Chinese artists, who remain skittish about Western galleries after a wave of sketchy dealers descended on China about 15 years ago.

“The major Chinese artists, none of them wanted to be represented by a gallery because they are still so scarred by the early 90s when two-bit dealers would buy up all their artworks and sit on them,” a Beijing based art critic and contributing editor to Artforum, Philip Tinari, said. Shady operators routinely cheated artists financially and failed to deliver on promises, he said. “It was just total amateur hour, art-market wise.”

It’s not clear whether Pace Wildenstein will accomplish much, for now, in the way of new sales in Beijing. The gallery’s leaders speak of selling Western art to collectors from China and elsewhere in Asia, but most well heeled buyers travel often to New York, London, and Paris, where the selection is sure to exceed that in Beijing. The most concrete impact of the new gallery will probably be to help the firm sign Chinese artists whose work can be sold in New York and Western artists eager to show in Beijing.

Mr. Leng, 43, said he will continue as the director of an alternative art gallery known as the Beijing Commune. His two hats could create a conflict with another New York gallery, Max Protech, which has ties to the Commune and still claims to represent Zhang Xiaogang.

Pace Wildenstein was created in 1993 by the Pace Gallery, which opened in Boston in 1960 and quickly moved to New York, and Wildenstein & Co., a family-owned, European art dealing firm that dates back to 1875. While Wildenstein is best known for handling Impressionist masterworks, Pace has been a major force in the modern art world for more than three decades.

The rocketing growth of the Chinese art scene presents an opportunity for Western dealers, but also a danger for those moving to establish a major presence. Though the 798 Art District is just a few years old, it is already suffering from its own success, which has driven up rents and led some to deride the area as a tourist trap. Just as New York’s artists migrated from SoHo to Chelsea, many Beijing artists and a few galleries have already decamped from 798 to another, arguably trendier, artists’ village known as Cao Changdi.