By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING - On a recent afternoon Wang Haiyang, a student at China’s top art school, was packing away some of his new oil paintings in the campus’s printmaking department. He is 23, and he just had his first major art exhibition at a big Beijing gallery.
Many of his works sold for more than $3,000 each, he said. And he hasn’t even graduated.
“This is one of my new works, he said proudly, gesturing toward a sexually provocative painting of a couple embracing. “I’ll be having another show in Singapore in March.
For better or for worse - depending on whom you talk to - Beijing’s state-run Central Academy of Fine Arts has been transformed into a breeding ground for hot young artists and designers who are quickly snapped up by dealers in Beijing and Shanghai.
The school is so selective that it turns away more than 90 percent of its applicants each year. Many of its faculty members are millionaires and its alumni include some of China’s most successful new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. And with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art, its students are suddenly so popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in search of the next art superstar.
“I can say we have the best students and the best faculty in China, said Zhu Di, the school’s admissions director. “And we give students a bright future.
Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering relationship with the art market is stirring unease among those who feel that students should be shielded from commercial pressures.
“The buyers are also going to the school to look for the next Zhang Xiaogang, said Cheng Xindong, a dealer in Beijing, referring to an art star, one of whose paintings sold for $3.3 million at a Sotheby’s sale in London in February. “And immediately they make contact with them, even before they graduate from school, saying, ‘I will buy everything from you.’
“This can be a dangerous thing, he said. “These young artists need time to develop.
Yet many counter that the school’s soaring fortunes also result from the Chinese government’s growing tolerance of experimental art, which was once banned. While Beijing still censors art that it deems politically offensive, including overtly critical portrayals of the ruling Communist Party, economic and market reforms have changed the way the government thinks about art and the way the Central Academy trains young artists.
In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen Square in central Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-style Realist art to about 200 students, many of whom were destined to work for the state. Today the school has a new 13-hectare campus and more than 4,000 students. It is the only arts college directly supported by the central government in Beijing.
In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students had a passion for art. “They viewed art as a way of life, he said, “and Central Academy was a talent pool. Now, as society has changed, more and more students view art as a job. Students are more practical.
Faculty salaries average just $700 a month, but the pay means little to most of these teachers, whose canvases might as well be painted in gold. Liu Xiaodong, a Central Academy graduate who has been on the faculty since 1994, is among the country’s wealthiest artists; a huge Three Gorges painting sold at auction last year for $2.7 million, a record for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time.
Sui Jianguo, the school’s dean and one of the country’s most acclaimed sculptors, has seen his works sell at auction for as much as $150,000.
The students seem less interested in politics and more concerned about their personal struggles and issues of identity, not unlike artists in the United States and Europe.
Chi Peng, who graduated in 2005 with a new-media degree, is viewed as a success story. He broke into the international art market a few years ago, at 25, with a series of photographs in which his naked image sprinted through the streets of Beijing with blurry red planes in hot pursuit.
Today he sells his computer-enhanced photographs for as much as $10,000 apiece. A decade ago Central Academy graduates who were lucky enough to sell a painting shortly after graduation would have been delighted to earn $100.
As for the pressures of the fast-moving art marketplace , he acknowledges some ambivalence.
Reflecting on his career ascent, he said: “It’s fast, really fast. I never could have imagined this, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for me.