The Power 100: Asia's Ambassadors - Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

68. Ai Weiwei
Artist, Chinese

Artist and architect Ai Weiwei is the undeniable star of the Chinese art scene, as well as a man with a romantic and media-friendly back story. The son of poet Ai Qing, who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for Western avant-garde sensibilities, the younger Mr. Ai, now 50 years old, left China for the U.S. in the 1970s, returning in 1993. Since then he has been instrumental to the building of an art scene in Beijing. His works question the value placed on artifacts (though his own work doesn't come cheap -- "Slanted Table," 1997, was estimated to fetch between $60,000 and $80,000 at a recent Phillips sale), and previous works have seen him tampering with Han Dynasty vases and other such treasures.

Mr. Ai's standing in the international art scene is strong: Shown at this year's Documenta 12 art exhibition, "Fairytale" was an ambitious performance-cum-experiential piece in which 1,001 Chinese people were transported to the German town of Kassel for the duration of the show. He is currently working with Swiss architectal firm Herzog & de Meuron as a design consultant on the National Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

85. Subodh Gupta
Artist, Indian

Subodh Gupta, a by-turns serious and chipper New Delhi-based artist, occupies an enormous place of stature within his native country; outside it, he has been immensely successful and is growing ever more so. François Pinault snapped up his "Very Hungry God" (2006), a large-scale skull made out of kitchen utensils, and exhibited it in front of the Palazzo Grassi during this year's Venice Biennale. Unlike Damien Hirst's cranial endeavor, Mr. Gupta's comes with a conscience -- the work was inspired by the fact that soup kitchens in Paris were offering pork to the Muslim poor.

Mr. Gupta ties together strands of conceptual Western art methods -- such as the ready-made and modes of defamiliarization (the use of everyday objects in such a way that they lose their familiarity) -- with specifically Indian subject matter. At the 2005 Frieze Art Fair, Mr. Gupta's Geneva gallery, Art & Public, devoted its entire stall to his stainless-steel cooking utensils, a reference to the similar items he sees around him in New Delhi. Another series cast in bronze is the ghathris, large tied bundles that are used to transport goods from town to town -- or for Mr. Gupta, from East to West and back again.

86. Zhang Xiaogang
Artist, Chinese

The poster boy for contemporary Chinese art is Zhang Xiaogang, born in 1958. His androgynous, expressionless family groups of the "Bloodline: The Big Family" series, based on family photographs taken in the 1920s, are an inevitable fixture in auctions and exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art.

Other Chinese artists have exploited the "big face" genre, but none so successfully as Mr. Zhang, who, according to art market information provider Artprice, outsold Jeff Koons at auction in 2006. In March, "Bloodline: Three Comrades" (1994) made more than $2 million at Sotheby's New York, and in September "Chapter of a New Century -- Birth of the People's Republic of China" (1992) sold for $3.065 million, also at Sotheby's.

Charles Saatchi has big holdings of Mr. Zhang's work, which will feature in the exhibition "New Chinese Art" at the opening of the new Saatchi gallery in London early next year. Not everyone appreciates the highly similar works that Mr. Zhang produces, with help from assistants, in his studios in Beijing and Sichuan. But the market pays increasingly frenzied prices for his work. Earlier this year PaceWildenstein announced it would be representing Mr. Zhang, along with another superhot Chinese artist, Zhang Huan, in the U.S. An exhibition of Mr. Zhang's work will be held in the gallery next spring.

87. Kim Chang-il
Collector, Korean

Businessman, collector, gallerist, artist -- Kim Chang-il is something of a Renaissance man, maybe even a mini-art world all of his own (as if to acknowledge this, the last London show of his own works was titled "CI Kim -- Myself"). The 58-year-old chairman of a transport company, a chain of 14 restaurants and the Arario department store also owns the Arario Gallery in Cheonan, south of Seoul, which, since it opened in 2002, has been dedicated to supporting the careers of the country's emerging artists. In 2005 Mr. Kim opened a sister gallery in Beijing, which has a similar mission with respect to Chinese art.