  eng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art, is running late. Always.
She just returned from New York City, where she is helping select a team of designers to create the Vantone Group's "China Center" on the former World Trade Center site.
This afternoon, she's racing to her own gallery, located in Shanghai's trendy Three-on-the-Bund space, for the opening of Wang Jianwei's video and sculpture installation. And tomorrow, she's hosting a group of international advisors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"I just couldn't get up yesterday," she says before heading to her gallery opening. "There's just too much work now. I've got to give a speech next week in Beijing, and I haven't finished preparing it."
This is the blurred existence that Weng Ling now lives. She's one of China's best-known gallery directors, and in the span of just two years has put the Shanghai Gallery of Art on the international map.
Virtually every major international arts group is now forced to pass through her gallery to get a feel for what is happening in China's red hot contemporary art scene.
And it's not just art insiders who are showing up. James Wolfensohn, the former head of the World Bank, came last year. Madame Chirac, the wife of French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, stopped by for a tour. And so did Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo, and Zhou Xiaochuan, the head of China's Central Bank.
Anyone who knows Weng will tell you the reason is simple: she knows everyone in the art world; has a knack for getting things done; and she's been steeped in China's art scene since the mid-1980s, when she was attending China's prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Indeed, there is perhaps no one in the art world today who so easily glides between the worlds of art and business the way Weng does. Governments consult her; collectors besiege her, artists love (and perhaps fear) her and real estate tycoons like Vanke's Wang Shi and Vantone's Feng Lun have sought out her counsel.
And while she got her start in Beijing, running the Gallery at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, she moved to Shanghai in 2002 to serve as co-director of the Shanghai Biennale and to help Handel Lee, the Chinese-American lawyer and entrepreneur, open the Shanghai Gallery of Art at Three-on-the-Bund, the historic colonial era building that has been handsomely renovated by the renowned architect Michael Graves.
 Now, Three-on-the-Bund, which is operated by the Singapore-based GITI Group, is packed with luxury brands, like Armani and Jean-Georges restaurant. On the third level is the Shanghai Gallery of Art, which has 1,000 square meters of exhibition space. And by moving to Shanghai to operate the gallery, Weng Ling has helped shift some power in the contemporary art world away from Beijing.
And are there detractors? Of course. Some art insiders here privately say that Weng Ling plays favorites among the artists; that she pushes a select group of artists she has long known, going back to her days in Beijing. And some say she is better at marketing to high end buyers rather than investing her time in finding bright new artists.
But few here dispute her power to sell artists -- and to connect the art world to the larger surrounding world of big money, politics and real estate.
Indeed, along with Lorenz Helbling, the Swiss-born director of ShanghArt, whose gallery represents Zhou Tiehai, Yang Fudong and Ding Yi, Weng Ling is said to have brought some of China's top contemporary artists to Shanghai's fast-growing art scene. And she has done it with the backing of Lee, who was once her fierce competitor in Beijing,when he oversaw the venerable CourtYard art gallery and restaurant.
When the GITI Group teamed up with Lee in 2001 to create Three-on-the-Bund, he tapped Weng, now 38, to run the stylish art gallery. And she brought with her a group of talented art experts from Beijing, including curators Zhang Li and the Hong Kong art expert David Chan.
In it's first year, the gallery featured a Who's Who in Chinese contemporary art, everyone from Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun to Xu Bing, Gu Dexin and Huang Yongping.
Weng said early on her mission was to help educate the public about Chinese contemporary art, and to help foster a collecting class among wealthy Chinese buyers, who had largely been absent from the contemporary art scene.
"For a while, all you had were western buyers," she says. "I kept saying, 'Why is it Chinese people don't know them? Why is your work not for your own people?'"
Things are different now. Wealthy Chinese are paying as much as $150,000 to collect the works of leading contemporary artists. And the best-known artists have long waiting lists of buyers.
Some of the freshness and idealism has been lost in the art craze, Weng Ling says. "The market is going up now not because of great ideas but because China is becoming wealthy," she says. "Art is becoming too commercial."
That would seem like a strange comment coming from the director of one of China's most luxurious galleries. But Weng Ling begs to differ, saying she is pushing artists to create original works that address modern problems.
"I want to bring art into the real world," she says. "I want to create a dialogue between artists and the real world. I don't want art to just be commercial."
eng Ling's story is well-known in art circles here. She grew up in Chongqing, in western Sichuan Province, the only daughter in a family of three children. Her first love was music. But her elder brother was an aspiring artist, and eventually she followed him into the arts.
When a family friend told her parents she was bright and ought to consider art history,Weng Ling decided to apply to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the only major school then offering art history as a major.
She was accepted into the Class of '89, which only included 200 students. And her timing, she says,was perfect. A new generation of artists was just coming of age, and many of them were classmates, like Fang Lijun, Liu Wei and Zeng Hao.
"I caught the most interesting period," she says in a lengthy interview at a restaurant near her home."At that time, everyone was experimenting; everyone wanted to do something avant-garde."
She never really took to her studies, she says. And part of the reason may have been the turbulence of the times, or the dryness of studying classical art history. Avant-garde and political pop art was just bursting onto the scene.
 In the winter of 1989, just months before graduation, Beijing held the notorious "No U-Turn" exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, which ended with an artist firing a bullet into an installation. The police closed down the show. And then, months later, many of her classmates joined the protests in Tiananmen Square, and even helped construct a lightweight "Goddess of Democracy" statue.
The graduation ceremony for the Class of '89 was canceled. avant-garde and political art was virtually banned in China. And Weng Ling went off to teach art history for a year in Guangzhou. A year later, she returned to Beijing to work in the China Film Archive. And then - for nearly six years - she lived with a boyfriend on the campus of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, meeting people and artists.
Weng Ling, most of her friends will tell you, has a gift for making friends, in all places, and is also one of the few Chinese art experts who can speak English. And that gift - for talking to artists, collectors, businessmen and government officials, is one of the secrets to her success.
That is perhaps why, in 1996, she was named director of the Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts,despite having virtually no gallery experience. And her timing was again, perfect. The gallery got funding from a group of Hainan financiers, who oversaw the gallery's operations independent of the university.
For nearly four years, Weng Ling ran the gallery. And during that time government control over contemporary art began to loosen. The government edict that art "serve the people" - and not question authority - was enforced less and less.
Artists like Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang, long blacklisted in China, started to show their work again. In fact, Zhang Xiaogang had one of his first solo exhibitions at Weng Ling's gallery in 1997, when his "Bloodlines: Big Family" series was just coming into focus.
Her gallery exhibitions also featured the likes of Mao Yan and Zeng Hao, her classmate. Before long, people were talking about the Gallery at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. And they were talking about Weng Ling.
After the gallery moved away from downtown in 2000, Weng Ling left to start her own arts organization, the Beijing Visual Arts Development Company. A year later, with Beijing competing to win the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, she was named curator of a breakthrough show.
Up to then, China's leading contemporary artists were not just ignored by the government, they were often banned from showing their works in China. But in 2001, Weng Ling created a show called "Towards a New Image: Twenty Years of Chinese Contemporary Painting -1981 to 2001." The exhibition, which featured 20 of China's leading contemporary arts painters, passed the Censors and helped define the canon of Chinese contemporary painting.
The government signed off on the exhibition. The Beijing Olympic Bid Committee even helped sponsor theshow. And the exhibition toured Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Sichuan, just as contemporary art in China was about to take off.
A year later, in 2002, Weng Ling helped curate the Shanghai Biennale. And then, Handel Lee brought her to the Shanghai Gallery of Art.
Since then, Weng Ling has shuttled around the world, meeting collectors, curators, designers and businessmen. She's tried to merge art and architecture shows at the Gallery, trying to create a bridge between the artists and the big city.
 And while artists pack the space, The Shanghai Gallery of Art has also become a forum for politics and culture, with speakers ranging from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times to Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University.
Though some have criticized the gallery for leaning too heavily on the nation's most established artists, Weng Ling says the Gallery has been busy commissioning new works, finding sponsors and selling art pieces to China's nouveau-rich, who now make up a large percentage of the Gallery's buyers.
Along the way, Weng Ling has become a kind of arts ambassador in Shanghai, hosting artists, architects and film makers at her apartment in Shanghai, and then flying off to Beijing for exhibitions and arts openings.
And while she has pushed artists to rethink their works and to reinvent themselves, one can't help but feel she and the artists are caught up in a feverish period of soaring art prices.
One of the most startling things to see in Beijing and Shanghai, is the small group of artists who graduated in the 1980s coming, sometimes by the bus load, to the opening of a fellow artist's exhibition.
There is Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Hao, slapping hands and hugging one another. There is Mao Yan and Zhou Tiehai toasting friends in the VIP room at Three-on-the Bund's Laris restaurant. And there is Weng Ling, the art history major,watching history being made - and reflecting on what still needs to be done.
"Art is still not that important in China," she says. "People think about business and other things. But we need artists. They can help shape society."
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