China's Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River will soon be the world's largest electricity-producing plant not just among those harnessing water, but of any kind. Spanning more than 7,500 feet across the river, its 38 generators will churn out one-ninth of all electricity needs for the nation's 1.5 billion people.

Yet when four contemporary Chinese artists responded to the dam's imminent 2011 completion, none depicted the mammoth engineering project in their works.

That's because the dam's impact had been felt long beforehand. Five years before starting construction in 1994, the Chinese government dealt a 10-month jail sentence to a journalist who dared criticize the project. As construction mounted, thousands of towns and villages were closed, with up to 1.24 million people displaced. Hundreds of archaeological sites became submerged, and environmentalists warned of downstream erosion and impacts on biodiversity.

In a nation where the economy grows by leaps and bounds, even as the rest of world reels under the collapse of the West's financial system, such is the price of progress, said Anthony Hirschel, director of the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art. In the United States, such a project would have generated equal parts controversy and, if completed, electricity. The Chinese have produced artistic responses every bit as unique as their culture.

"For the Chinese, complex situations demand nuanced responses," Hirschel said, waving his arm over the works by the four Chinese artists included in "Displacement: Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art."

Criticizing the Three Gorges Dam, Hirschel said, is easy from a Western perspective. Criticizing the project in its full context is more difficult. The West has long complained of China's reliance on coal, which contributes to greenhouse gases. Three Gorges Dam, it's estimated, will eliminate 10 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions annually. The project also helps economic development in China's poorer rural inland. Besides, the Yangzi River in its natural state has killed thousands over the years due to flooding.

The works of video artist Chen Quilin, painters Yun-Fei Ji and Liu Xiadong, plus conceptual artist Zhuang Hui speak in one voice as a reaction to the dam's inevitable existence. Any criticism you might read into their works is at best muted. Bitterness at loss is a natural reaction, they seem to say. But so are change and progress.

"These works are powerful, but if they constitute a criticism of the Chinese government it's a very oblique criticism. They allow you to draw your own conclusions," Hirschel said. "The Chinese operate on a scale combining ambition with obligation that's very different from the way we work."

The artists. Quilin marks the loss of her childhood village in four video works. Children tailor uniforms out of construction tarps in one episode, but the series ends with images of villagers carrying flower pots. Life goes on, Quilin acknowledges, even after grievous loss.

Ji paints images in homage to traditional Chinese scroll painting, but renders it anew by depicting scenes of migration as the dam is built. The ends of two scrolls collide in a corner, symbolic of jarring changes the dam has brought.

Xiadong, perhaps the best-known contemporary Chinese painter outside his country, salutes the laborers who helped build the project in his large-scale painting "Hotbed." The panels used to form a single image don't quite match. One is left incomplete. Xiadong's figures of working men and his choice of colors are unmistakably vibrant and strong, however. The painting drops more than a few hints about the virility of China's dynamic economy.

Hui offers the most whimsical take on the dam's impact: photographs of large holes he dug from the ground that would soon be submerged. His digging tool of choice was the same instrument used by ancient Chinese tomb robbers.

"Except for the photographs themselves, there would be no evidence of what [Hui] did," Hirschel said. "But that would be the point."

"Displacement" first appeared last fall in Chicago at the Smart Museum. Salt Lake City is only its second United States stop. It will be on display at the Salt Lake Art Center through Feb. 27.

"It's the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, certainly in Salt Lake City and perhaps even Utah," said Catherine Kanter, president of the center's board of directors. "It's particularly relevant because of the dialogue it fosters with respect to issues so important here in the West and round the world relating to clean energy, environmental concerns and impact on personal lives. Plus, it's simply visually brilliant."