Yangjiang, China (CNN) -- In terms of underground Chinese art, Ai Weiwei may be grabbing the headlines but he is just one artist in an expanding galaxy of edgy and sometimes provocative work that has been coming out of China's contemporary art scene for more than a decade. 

There's Ou Zhihang, better known as "Naked Push-up Brother," a performance artist who disrobes at the scenes of newsworthy scandals and catastrophes and pumps out a series of press-ups. 

There are the Gao Brothers, whose sculpture of a firing squad of Mao Zedong clones taking aim at a figure of Jesus put them on the wrong side of China's increasingly skittish and jumpy authorities. 

And in southern China's Yangjiang -- an unprepossessing industrial city famous for producing one in 10 of the knives and scissors found in American homes -- there's the Yangjiang Group; a trio of seasoned drinkers whose work, while not overtly political, attacks one of the Chinese culture's sacred traditions -- calligraphy. 

"When I was at school, my teacher used to tell me how bad my handwriting was," says Zheng Guogu, an artist in his own right outside the group, but who has worked with the other two -- Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin -- for 10 years. "But then I thought, who is he to tell me that my calligraphy is bad?" 

China works hard to project soft power 

In China, writing is considered an artform and is so important to the meaning of the words that the lyrical power of a poem, for instance, is carried through the style of the handwriting. 
Who?
but who has worked with the other two -- Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin