Photography, suggests the V & A blurb accompanying this exhibition, is a means of re-imagining China; it is a metaphor for a country hitting its stride. "For the past two decades, China has undergone remarkable economic, social and cultural transformations. These changes have shaped the development of experimental art." The lacuna, of course, is political transformation: here China has lagged its feet. While its people still struggle to look out at the world - cf. state censorship of the internet, to cite just the most topical example - the world is increasingly invited to look in on China and approve. Our experts in these matters tell us that we must be both admiring and fearful of the Chinese 'tiger' economy. But what are we to make of China's art? There is no hard index of comparison for cultures, as there is for economies; and anyway, it is tempting to think, Chinese culture is singular. So different from the culture of the West that we can only understand it as a delightful enigma. Orientalisms legacy is that our default position is to view art from China as a mystery to be solved. But that is our agenda, and as a trip to the V & A confirms, the artists themselves have their own, individual concerns.

The eponymous selling-point of Between Past and Future is that new Chinese photography and video reconciles the traditions of ancient China with the dynamics of modernisation. Tools of propaganda until the 1990s, photography and video have become the mediums of truth-telling. In the 'History and Memory' section, we are given images of Chinese icons-but not as we know them. The Gao Brothers' photograph of a portrait of Chairman Mao, 'An Installation on Tiananmen Square 1995', was taken from such an extreme angle as to introduce 'a degree of absurdity.' You can see up Mao's nose. Humour is freedom; by laughing at the dictator, you weaken, slightly, his power over you. Elsewhere, a naked, raven-haired figure stalks the Great Wall of China. 'Fen Ma-Liuming' is the alter ego of the artist Ma Liuming, and his fragility and uncertain sexuality are in stark contrast to the timeless certainties embodied by the Great Wall. The individual is these artists' most effective subject: it is their weapon against the dystopian cliché of the 'faceless masses'. China, with a population of more than a billion, and still politically communist, is more susceptible to this cliché than most. With the interplay between history and modernity established as an overarching motif, individuality is the dominant theme of the exhibition's subsequent three sections.

Perhaps the most striking work in section two, 'Performing the Self', is a self-portrait by Yin Xiuzhen, featuring ten photographs of the artist, mounted in ten pairs of identical black shoes. Each photograph is printed in a different colour, and shows Yin at a different stage of her life. To add a final layer of fragmentation, each pair of shoes rests on a different surface. The concept is simple - a person's clothes contain their memories - yet this is a lush, multilayered work of art that beautifully captures the bitter-sweetness of the aging process. Not dissimilar is Zhang Huan's 'Family Tree', a collage of nine photographs of Zhang's face progressively being obscured by calligraphy. Again, the intention seems to be to locate the individual within the vastness of Chinese society: in the V & A's words, "the characters refer to family relationships, celebrated Chinese tales and the primal elements of earth, fire and water. Together they suggest the web of familial, social and cultural relations that threaten any sense of individual identity." The third phase of the exhibition, 'Re-imagining the Body' gives this notion a more corporeal twist: there is a flavour of grotesquery in the photography of Rong Rong, which, in a very post-modern way, captures Rong's fellow artists in performance. Ma Liuming, for example, appears holding a broken mask up to his face; and the mask, we learn, is one of 1500 casts made of the face of another artist, Cang Xin.

The nexus of this self-referential artistic community in the mid-1990s was Beijing's 'East Village'-which gives the lie to any thesis that these photos are in a broad sense representative of modern China. Between Past and Future represent a genre, not a phenomenon. Still, it is a beguiling prism through which to access this universe of a country, if that is what you want to do, and it is pungent art: Xu Zhen's piece 'Actually I Am Also Very Blurred', in which an abandoned house is covered with micro-images of body parts (taken from pornographic images and printed on post-its), is as disturbing as anything by Tracy Emin. One artist in the final section, 'People and Place', is compared to Diane Arbus; and certainly, Lia Zhang's black-and-white photographs of ordinary Chinese people have the same surreal power as Arbus's visions of New York.

Do these artists care what we think about how aptly they capture the new China? Probably not. One photograph in 'People and Place', for me, sums up the 'delightful enigma'. Yang Yong's 'Undefined' features a young boy silhouetted against the industrial night sky of Shenzhen, a boom city of eight million inhabitants, average age twenty-five: the 'Shenzhen generation'. How many schools of artists might be contained in that eight million? The V & A's presentation here is, as usual, superb and the exhibits are uniformly wonderful. But, I am no closer to solving the mystery.