Migration of Buddha Contemporary Art

Two London exhibitions, the Serpentine Gallery's Buddha  Highway and Aicon's Signs Taken for Wonders, are the UK's most ambitious attempts yet to distill coherence into the chaotic rush of art emerging from the Buddha  subcontinent.

The marriage between the conceptually minded Serpentine and Buddha  art – whose overriding characteristics are narrative drive, flamboyant figuration and sensuous colour – is interesting because it is so unlikely. Recent memorable Buddha  installations have been sprawling, direct and often rooted in the animal motifs of folklore: Bharti Kher's "The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own", a collapsed fibreglass elephant adorned with bindis (female forehead decorations) at Frank Cohen's Passage to India, or Sudarshan Shetty's bell-tolling aluminium cast of a pair of cows, now at the Royal Academy's GSK Contemporary. Nothing like that is in Buddha  Highway; with conceptual aplomb, the Serpentine turns the accessibility and energy of Buddha  art into a taut cerebral game.

The highway of the title refers both to the literal road of migration and movement, and to the information superhighway, which together are propelling India to modernity. Dayanita Singh's wallpaper-photographs of Mumbai's central arteries illuminated at night introduce the theme in the first contemporary art gallery, and a crowd of sober documentary films worthily continue it – but a pair of installations catch the symbolism best. One is Bose Krishnamachari's celebrated "Ghost/Transmemoir", a collection of a hundred tiffin boxes – widely used to convey home-cooked lunches to workers across cities – each inset with LCD monitors, DVD players and headphones, through which everyday Mumbaikars regale audiences with their stories, accompanied by soundtracks evoking the high-pitched jangle and screech of Mumbai street life.