COURTESY OF PLUM BLOSSOMS GALLERY HEAD MEN: Paintings like Zhu Wei's Sketch No. 1 reflect a passionate sentiment that the individual deserves the space to breathe and flourish

Zhu wei is a diminutive man with a very large head. One of the progenitors of modern Chinese art's "big head movement," the Beijing-based artist paints portraits of bubble-headed people, their gargantuan proportions stretching the confines of both his giant canvases and, if we must get metaphorical, their worlds. Traditional Chinese art likes to shrink the human figure: in Qing dynasty scrolls, mere mortals were eclipsed by the ostentation of nature, with its towering cliffs and heaven-scraping mountains. Only by looking closely could you spot a tiny fisherman perched by the edge of a rushing river. Chairman Mao furthered this scaling down of the individual by boasting that China teemed with so many people that it could send human wave after human wave into war without weakening his fledgling nation.

The "big head" artists have turned this very notion on its head. The People's Republic may be crammed with 1.3 billion citizens—not to mention thousands of stratospheric skyscrapers—but each person, say the big heads, deserves the space to breathe and flourish, if only on canvas. Zeng Fanzhi, a native of Wuhan in Hubei province, central China, paints lost souls struggling for identity in China's thronging metropolises, their fashionable clothes juxtaposed with the cauterized expressions people adopt to survive in big cities. Such portraits are introspective, whimsical celebrations of a China in which the individual can triumph over the group. Perhaps that victory is not so surprising given that some of the self-absorbed offspring of the nation's one-child policy are just picking up their paintbrushes. But the big heads hope their art can accomplish something else. "It's only by focusing on the individual that we can find real talent in China," says Zhao Nengzhi, a big head who lives in Chengdu in central Sichuan province. Then, walking glumly down streets where wooden teahouses have been replaced by characterless, concrete boxes, he adds, "We live in a country that desperately needs a little genius."