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The sound was deep, resonant and clear. For the unveiling of My Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art in March last year, Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan oversaw the ritualized shearing of a sheep, whose wool he later walked over, before a Buddhist temple bell was struck by a life-size bronze cast of the artist's naked body. For whom the bell tolls … These days in the world of contemporary art, it seems to be tolling for China - from established art stars like Zhang and gunpowder virtuoso Cai Guo-Qiang to the new generation of artists, spawned by the sprawling studio complexes of Beijing and Shanghai, who seem to show up at every international biennale these days. Curator Binghui Huangfu, director of Sydney's Asia-Australia Arts Centre, predicts that over the next 20 years the art world will be increasingly focused on China. "If you're not really interested in being a part of it," she says, "then you will be left out."

The impact of Chinese artists on the Australian art scene is already being felt from within. Sydney gallery director Gene Sherman describes this world as "a very delicate ecosystem, both in terms of the practitioners, and also in terms of people like us." While artists like Guan Wei, Ah Xian, and Liu Xiao Xian, all of whom moved to Australia following the Tiananmen Square killings 16 years ago, are hardly household names, they are for the dealers, curators and gallery directors who make the art world go round. Their works are being quietly amassed by the collections that count, and they're starting to win the big commissions - actually, the biggest: last year, Guan Wei's 120-panel wall painting, Feng Shui, took up its new home in the foyer of Melbourne's Bureau of Meteorology. "Oh yes, they're very clever," says curator Rhana Devenport, who helped shape the last four Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery. Chinese artists are "very clear about their own practice, and very careful about where they're positioning themselves in the country."

At his kitchen table in Sydney's south, Liu Xiao Xian is "playing" chess on his laptop computer screen. Actually, he's clicking on images from his 2001 wooden sculpture, Game, in which meticulously carved Chinese and European pieces face off across a chess board. It's a typically disarming work from Liu, 41, whose photos and installations speak eloquently of his shift to Australia in 1990. "There are no rules how to move," he says. "That's been my experience - how to make the negotiation? How to make it workable?" With recent work taking center stage at the Art Gallery of New South Wales' new Asian galleries and the Adelaide Biennial, Liu has undoubtedly succeeded. He and his generation of Chinese artists have shown how cultural outsiders can become Australian art world insiders.

"They couldn't say hello in English, let alone have a conversation," says Gene Sherman, recalling the day Liu ("Shannon, we called him") shepherded brother Ah Xian and friend Guan Wei into her gallery in early 1989. Then on residencies at the University of Tasmania's School of Art, all three would settle permanently in Australia after Tiananmen Square, their causes helped by lobbying from the former cultural attaché to Beijing, Nicholas Jose. But while they exhibited in group shows together in the early '90s, only Guan Wei was picked up by an Australian commercial gallery. As it transpires, going it alone without a dealer has paid off handsomely for the brothers. "They do find it very easy to get in touch with museums, where their pieces are mainly collected," explains curator Binghui, "so they don't see the necessity."

In Ah Xian's case, his staggeringly beautiful sculptures speak for themselves. During a residency at Sydney College of the Arts in 1998, he began producing a series of porcelain busts, hand-cast and decorated in Ming and Qing Dynasty motifs. But it was an Australia Council–funded trip back to China the following year that equipped him for stardom. There, in a workshop outside Beijing, he became skilled in the 700-year-old techniques of cloisonné, a painstaking process of copper-wire enameling which he applied to full body-casting. Human human–lotus, cloisonné figure I, 2000-01, took out Australia's inaugural National Sculpture Prize. With a solo show at New York's Asia Society in 2002, Ah Xian's commercial cachet soared, with prices for his sculptures tripling overnight.

In Australia, Guan Wei's career has grown more steadily. His calligraphic, comic-book-style paintings have lightened in hue as much as they have widened in scope. In recent years, they've become great swathes of blue across which his themes of exile and emancipation play out. While appealing to corporate collections - "that's how you make influence," notes curator Binghui - he hasn't shied away from hot-button issues like asylum seekers. "There was a moment when he was a Chinese artist living in Australia, then he became a Chinese-Australian artist, and now he's an Australian artist," says dealer Sherman. At Guan Wei's most recent show last year, Cate Blanchett became a collector. "She spent hours, hours, talking to him, and about the work," Sherman recalls. "She was absolutely fascinated."

Australia's fascination with Chinese art should continue to grow - a huge survey of its newest mainland forms, "Critical Mass," is planned for Sydney in 2007, just in time for the Beijing Games. These artists are not "against the tide," insists the show's curator, Binghui Huangfu, "rather, they are part of the tide. So nobody can stop them."

• Michael Fitzgerald
• A savvy new generation of China-born artists is putting its stamp on the Australian art world