The art of China has been on the tips of everyone's tongues since Ai Weiwei stole the thunder from a bourgeoning national museums growth in the Middle East by painting a million sunflower seeds, placing them in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and then having the gall to be arrested as a dissident by his own government.  I'm being facetious, of course, but interest in art from the Oriental East has been paramount in the twenty-first century and almost all the major museums have exhibited collected works by artists from the region.  The latest, which opens this Friday, is the Hayward Gallery, who present Art of Change: New Directions from China.  This is a display of performance and installation, in what the museum call the first major exhibition of its kind.

It's very easy to talk of 'new directions' when the overwhelming majority would likely not heard of the exhibiting artists, despite their individual profiles in their home country.  Equally, it is easier to select the best and highest profile of these artists.  The change that is referenced in the title of this show is the development in the career of each exhibiting artist.  The Hayward Gallery have selected work by eight artists, dating from the 1980s to the present day.  The exhibition then traces the changes in each artist's work, juxtaposing early pieces with recent works and commissions.

Very broadly, Chinese artists have been very savvy in utilising the opportunities afforded them with an increased international awareness of their work.  An art market that has been bouyed by the emergence of Chinese painting, which merges ancient technique with very modern-day concerns, has played an important part in raising the profile of Chinese art.  Performance and installation is generally thought to be 'art with a message', and the artists in this exhibition certainly have something to say about the state of China over the past thirty years.  It's an interesting concept made manifest, reflections of the macro through the eyes of a single artist.

Art of Change: New Directions from China opens at the Hayward Gallery this Friday, 07 September, until 09 December.

The London Open is back in 2012 for its eightieth anniversary.  This open submission triennial exhibition is a highlight now for artists London-wide, replacing as it does the East End Academy - established in 1932, open to 'all artists living and working East of the famous Aldgate Pump'.  Organised and hosted by Whitechapel Gallery, this iteration sees thirty two artists, chosen by a panel of experts, displaying a range of work that includes painting, sculpture, film, textiles, photography, installation and performance.

And what do have to look forward to this year?  Because favourite Alice Channer is hot property: she describes her body-based sculptures as 'dressing a gallery'.  These are carefully assembled constructions; fusions of Chanel with Mondrian, the utilitarian and the conceptual.  Greta Alfaro was one of the stars of New Contemporaries 2010, her HD videos creations occurring in textured, violent landscapes.

The London Open has some cache, the exhibition helped to start the careers of artists including Grayson Perry, Bob and Roberta Smith and Rachel Whiteread, whose laurel leaves crown the expanded Kunsthalle.  This is an opportunity for artists that are on the precipice of established careers to meet professional artists, curators and collectors.  And we all are their audience, supportive and expectant.

The London Open is at Whitechapel Gallery until 14 September.

Who doesn't love a bit of Lomography? Positioned as professional for the amateur photographer, it has done wonders for simplifying the process and making sure that almost anyone can take eye-catching pictures. Cameraphones, instagram be damned. Lomography is the choice for the non-professional picture taker.

The Museum of London present LomoWall, an exhibition undertaken with Lomography, and the first of its kind in the UK since 2007. The display, like the cameras, is startlingly simple and equally as attractive. Wrapped sixty-five metres around the entrance and rotunda of the museum (based, appropriately enough, in London Wall) are three hundred thousand pictures submitted by more than fifteen thousand people from thirty-two countries, all under the theme of 'inspiring and achieving in London's Olympic year'.

And the Museum of London is surely the most germane of locations, representing the most wonderful and awesome of the capital's present and history. And this is precisely what the LomoWall is: a series of individual moments of 2012 - a historic year in the history of this greatest of cities - captured and celebrated by ordinary people, inspired across the world.

LomoWall is at the Museum of London until 06 January 2013.