Her decision to present those two was cemented when she stopped in Paris last September after her Moscow trip to take in the exhibition “Moscopolis” at the Louis Vuitton emporium on the Champs-Élysées. The powerful LVMH Foundation, run by luxury-goods magnate Bernard Arnault, was behind the show, for which new works were created by Chelushkin and Kallima—both of whom already show in French galleries—plus a handful of other Russian stars, from midcareer figures like Kulik and Valéry Koshlyakov to young talent like 26-year-old Chtak.

Carefully timed international showcasing like this is giving Russians the same attention that has lately been going to artists from other emerging economies, such as China and India. Following close on the heels of “Moscopolis” was “Russia Miami,” curated by the Hermitage’s Julie Sylvester and sponsored by collector Janna Bullock, which took place during Art Basel in December in Miami’s Design District. Two standouts from the show were Ukrainian-born photographer Sergei Bratkov, who makes jarring, often humorous color photographs of ordinary Russians, and St. Petersburg–based Sergei Bugaev, a highly political artist known as Afrika who was represented in Miami by an antique sleigh decked out to look like a rickety ship, a potent metaphor for his home country.

Yet what characterizes the young Russian artists of today is their resistance to ghettoization by nationality. “I don’t think there is a brand of Russian art,” says the New York dealer Daneyal Mahmood, who discovered Peter Belyi at Russia Miami’s 2006 predecessor, Modus R, and eventually sold one of the young sculptor’s pieces to the respected Miami collector Martin Margulies. “I feature mostly political art, and what these artists are speaking to is more global than local.”

Michael Gillespie, of New York’s Foxy Production gallery, agrees. He represents Chernysheva, 44, who began as a painter and sculptor but now makes videos and photographs of such mundane subjects as workers in the Moscow metro system, lending them dignity through her poetic approach. Her pieces appeared in the “Moscopolis” show and are in the collection of the LVMH Foundation. “We won’t be positioning her as Russian,” says Gillespie. “We want to present her as an international artist.”

The tensions between those approaches are visible at Sotheby’s, which last year conducted its first sale in a specially created contemporary Russian-art category, setting some 25 artist’s records in the process. Specialist Joanna Vickery explains that the house’s policy going forward is to present one post-1960s Russian sale per year; the next one takes place in London on March 12. But high prices for artists like Bulatov have also been coming to the attention of specialists in the general contemporary-art department.

In the end, there may be enough to go around. “The Russian contemporary market is fairly young as a whole,” says Vickery. “And across the board one can expect it will appreciate in value.”

"Eastern Promises" originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2008 Table of Contents.