Paradise on Earth

The Asia Society cannot compete with major venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, when it comes to bringing us faraway cultures on a magnificent scale. But smaller museums with considerably less at their disposable sometimes mount shows on the scale of chamber works that are as satisfying as fully orchestrated affairs. The Asia Society's "The Arts of Kashmir" is such a show. Curated by India scholar Pratapaditya Pal, the milestone exhibit demonstrates what magic can happen when an institution brings together the right people and, consequently, the right objects, to create an intimate environment of exquisite things that makes you hungry for more. It also doesn't hurt that the show's subject is the Valley of Kashmir, a region roughly the size of Connecticut whose fewer than 4,000 square miles have long been described as a paradise on earth.

"The Arts of Kashmir," installed chronologically, is not a comprehensive, centuryby-century survey of the region, but rather a collection of some of the finest Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic sculpture, textiles, calligraphy, painting, furniture, and crafts from between the second and 19th centuries. The exhibit feels smaller than its list of 130 objects would suggest — an observation that is not a criticism but a compliment, as well as a relief.

In an era when shows boast upward of 300 objects, it is refreshing to encounter an exhibit that does not attempt to exhaust its subject along with its viewers. Extremely well-paced, "The Arts of Kashmir" is filled with variety. It comprises superbly sculpted Buddhas, gods, and goddesses in bronze, brass, stone, wood, and ivory; intricately woven carpets, prayer rugs, coats, and shawls; jewelry, a silver tea service, mosque tiles, painted furniture, and illuminated manuscripts. But the show is not so large and it does not leave you so breathless and awestruck that by the time you have reached its last gallery you have lost sight of where you began. The exhibit retains its shape from beginning to end, and what a beautiful and multifarious shape it is.

Kashmir, long celebrated for two of the finest wools in the world — pashmina from the domestic goat, and shah tus, finer and rarer, from the wild antelope — is probably best known for its finely woven shawls, which have become synonymous with Kashmir itself. In terms of shawls, "The Arts of Kashmir" does not disappoint. In the last gallery of the show are some magnificent textiles, including a grouping of elaborate shawls, some of which display hypnotic medallions at their centers. An artist reminds us of their source: Among the textiles is the watercolor "A Shawl Goat From Bhutan" (1779). The long-haired goat, painted in profile, floats alone on the large white page. It has twisted, featherlike horns, and it drifts invitingly through the whiteness like a downy-soft pillow-cloud.

"The Arts of Kashmir" includes sumptuous Mogul carpets and embroidered coats along with its shawls, some of which, during the 19th century, were of European design. Kashmir's shimmering textiles are among the highlights of the exhibition. Intricate universes with multiple levels, they feel alive, as if they are breathing. Rather than merely look at the textiles, you must give yourself over to the weavings, immerse yourself as if in meditation, and allow the designs to assault your senses and keep you afloat. Dizzying and dense, they are often so finely detailed that no matter how hard you try, you cannot focus on their smallest incidents. This creates a layered, transparent world that feels ever-deepening, shrinking, and opening: The textiles keep pulling you inward. But their experience is also one of expansion, an explosion of flowers, vines, moons, and paisleys.

The Kashmir Valley is also known for its lush landscape, Islamic gardens, Buddhist sculpture, and Hindu temples. The region has long been a crossroads for interchange between Persia, central Asia, China, Tibet, and India. A mix of Buddhist, Brahmanic, Islamic, Sikh, English, and European influence, Kashmir has endured the cultural weight of divergent sources. "The Arts of Kashmir" presents us with the highest results of those influences, reminding us that art, in times of upheaval as well as peace, is the bond that holds a society together.

Evident in this show, despite its 2,000-year span, are the artistic similarities between objects. There is a sense of a lineage of energy — a bloodline — moving through millennia. One of the overwhelming metaphors in the show's artworks — from its textiles and sculpture to its tea set and candlesticks — is that of the forms and forces of nature, which pulse like veins in the works, creating spiritual solidity and calm. The greatest artworks in the show are alive with the movements of nature, but overall they convey a sublime reserve — the strength of spirit expressed through the arrest of motion. It's as if everything in the art were happening just below the surface, and as if everything just below the surface were the source of the artworks' life and form.

In many of the sculptures, including the brass "Buddha Shakyamuni" (c. 998–1026) and the copper and silver "Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (8th century), the figures appear to float in translucent, misty skins; and linear striations transform their bodies into pools, in which our presence as viewers appears to have caused, like wind or stones, ripples across their surfaces. This rippling is also felt in the painting "Buddha with Gods and Monks" (12th century). The Buddha's body, like all of the forms in the painting, is flat and held to the picture's ground plane. Yet the painter has decorated and activated the Buddha with a red, white, and blue checkerboard, allowing him to appear to shift from flatness into volume. The checkerboard is made up of squares, elongated rectangles, and diamonds, as if its pattern had been stretched, even twisted, in the plane. The Buddha, whose body flickers like a lighted dance floor, ultimately remains flat, still, and suspended.

Lately, the region of Kashmir is noteworthy for its being at the heart of a troubled region. "The Arts of Kashmir" hopes to shift the West's focus away from Kashmir as a center of cultural turmoil, to one of cultural importance. The beauty and life of the art of Kashmir, as demonstrated by this show, is in its unerring stillness and repose — in its ability, despite everything the region continues to endure, to keep malleable its form and eternally solid its spirituality. This show, a treasure trove of Kashmiri emissaries, certainly shifts the weight to Kashmir's artistic excellence. It also reiterates that, no matter how distracted we may be and no matter what life throws at us, art continues to thrive with a life of its own.

Until January 6 (725 Park Ave. at 70th Street, 212-288-6400).