Works on show at Yangjiang Group's exhibition Photos: Courtesy of Minsheng Art Museum

The avant-garde art trio Yangjiang Group, named after the city in Guangdong Province where the collective was formed in 2002, has attracted growing international attention over the past decade.

The collective is known for creating bold and innovative works that integrate calligraphy with other art forms, such as sculpture, installation, performance, video, and even plants and gardens. Art critic Hou Hanru, the artistic director of the MAXXI National Museum in Rome, once commented that Yangjiang Group's works are "anything but 'artistic'."

The group is made up of Yangjiang natives Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin, though only Chen has received formal training in calligraphy.

They have been featured at the Gwangju Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, Kassel Documenta, as well as in such prestigious museums as Tate Liverpool and the San Diego Museum of Art.

Currently Minsheng Art Museum is playing host to an exhibition by the group, which offers a glimpse of what they've done in the past decade through nine of their art projects.

Most of their works take inspiration from real life in Yangjiang, which, like most Chinese cities, is undergoing tremendous changes, and their methods are often unconventional.

Some of their calligraphies were created when they were drunk and had no idea what they were writing. They once participated in online gambling games that have sucked in many families in Yangjiang, lost more than 100,000 yuan ($16,414), and recorded the gambling as part of an artwork. And possibly the most time-consuming art project of the group is a huge complex called "Age of Empires" in the Yangjiang suburbs, which has been under construction since 2001, funded by the money they've made from exhibitions.

Works on show at Yangjiang Group's exhibition Photos: Courtesy of Minsheng Art Museum

Compared with Beijing or Shanghai, the art scene in Guangdong is considered by insiders to be less market-oriented. Artists there seem to care less about the art scene elsewhere and enjoy more freedom to follow their own hearts, Yangjiang Group being a good example. Zheng, the group's spiritual leader, attributes his independent thinking to the rigid education system in Guangdong, saying that local art teachers are teaching the same thing they taught 20 years ago.

"The art academy is the most conservative place," said Zheng, who graduated from the print-making school of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. "But where there is oppression, there is rebellion, so the most radical art may be forced to come into being in the most conservative place."

At the ongoing exhibition, you may encounter a traditional chess board outlined by split sugar canes on a wall (it's a traditional game in Guangdong to split vertical sugar canes and whoever gets the longest cut plane is the winner), rice paper inscribed with Chinese characters from the translation of Karl Marx's Capital, or a sphygmomanometer to measure the audiences' blood pressure before and after viewing the artists' calligraphy works.

Though Zheng may seem to be anti-traditional, Chen Tong, a painter who has known Zheng since the 1990s, said Zheng can often be found listening to CDs preaching Taoism, Confucius' teachings and the I Ching, to name a few.

But the group thrives on challenging the fixed rules of the artistic world. Thus don't feel surprised when you see the familiar Chinese art history term "85 New Wave" changed to "58 New Wave" and the hard-to-recognize characters "Bu Li Yi Fa" written on the wall. Meaning 'no rules,' those characters, which is also the name of the exhibition, are actually written with a whisk.

Date: Until February 22, 2014, 10 am to 6 pm (closed on Mondays)

Venue: Minsheng Art Museum

民生美术馆

Address: Bldg F, 570 Huaihai Road West

淮海西路570号F座

Tickets: 20 yuan, and 5 yuan for students

Call 6282-8729 for more information