Asian artists at this year's Venice Biennale have staged an exciting variety of shows around the city. Many are designed to please and entertain. Some have arrived with a darker vision.

A couple of Japanese, Chinese and Taiwan artists have explored the darker sides of their societies with photographs, installations, and, in one case, body parts in formaldehyde.

The most controversial of these Asian artists has to be Xiao Yu from China's Inner Mongolia region. His installation in the Arsenale comprises a series of laboratory jars filled with the joined body parts of different animals creating strange beasts of the imagination.

Rodent bodies with bird wings are strikingly uncomfortable. However with a real foetus head on one, some viewers were running for the exit.

The ethics of his work seem very questionable. His underlying impulse is understandable. Cloning and genetic manipulation are controversial.

Memory and loss

Hai Bo, also from China, dealt with memory and change in a series of parallel photographs. His work took blown up prints of old photos and juxtaposed them against contemporary reconstructions.

A picture of five young army recruits was set against the picture of a middle-aged man all alone with empty chairs. Where were the four others?

The sweetest was one of a child walking up a hill to a pagoda alone in the snow. The parallel picture was of a middle-aged man also trudging up the hill to the same pagoda. The small saplings of earlier years were now sturdy trees.

Mother and son

The Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto's photographic work entitled "Art Mama" took on the consumerism and forgetfulness of modern Japan.