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With an exhibition of Asian art that stretches from the Bronze Age to the 20th century, you'd think the Cantor Arts Center would use the big gallery.

Instead, a modest upstairs room houses the new show, with the museum making ample use of the space. "From the Bronze Age of China to Japan's Floating World" features a surprisingly diverse array of works set against pale-green and gray walls.

Chinese bronze vessels for wine and food date back to the ninth, 11th and even 14th centuries B.C.E., while Hakyou Matsumae's delicate ink painting "Banana and Snail" recalls Japan in 1800. There are paper lanterns, impossibly tiny satin shoes, an embroidered blue silk brocade robe, and a chest of wood, brass and iron.

On one wall, relatively modern war seethes in "Liberating Jinan," one of the many color woodblock prints on display. Made by Jin Lang of China, the 1940s-era print depicts the Communist Party's capture of the city of Jinan from the Chinese Nationalist Party. As colorful, striking and bellicose as a comic book, with its fighting men, it seems worlds apart from the more traditional prints nearby.

Like several recent exhibitions at Stanford University's Cantor museum, "Floating World" focuses on acquisitions from the past decade. That still left the curators with a large pool to choose from. The Cantor has acquired about 1,000 Asian-art pieces since 1999; "Floating World" contains about 50. (Overall, the museum has some 5,000 works of Asian art; many can be seen elsewhere in the building.)

"Part of our challenge was trying to make some order out of this material," Stanford Asian-art professor Richard Vinograd said at the exhibition's opening last week. He assembled the show with museum Asian-art curator Xiaoneng Yang and a class of graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

Besides writing exhibition labels and papers on works in the show, the students also learned about the give-and-take that can go into choosing works for an exhibition, Vinograd said. "There were lively discussions ... they had to make a case for their items," he said.

Not all of the students were specialists in Asian art, he added. "Sometimes they were captivated by a particular object and wanted to learn more about it."

Broadly speaking, the show's theme is "transmission," Vinograd said. Transmission between past and present, with artifacts being recovered by modern researchers. Transmission between cultures, with ideas flowing back and forth. Transmission among families, with objects passed down through generations.

Ritual items such as the bronze vessels would have been passed down from parents to children. One can imagine the food container (gui) from 850 B.C.E., with its scrolling designs and proud ridges, as a particular treasure.

More dubious prizes to the modern eye are the tiny satin boots and shoes embroidered with birds and flowers. They were meant for women with bound feet.

"The ideal size was the 'three-inch golden lotus foot'; this was rare, and women with feet this size had to have sufficient social and economic status to employ a servant to support them while walking," an exhibition card reads.

One of the most common ways the theme manifests itself is through East-West transmission of technology and thoughts -- and stereotypes.

A late-17th-century porcelain jar from Japan depicts a Western sailing ship and a host of Dutch men, "who dominated trade with Japan in the 17th century," the card reads. The men in tights all have red hair. Because everyone knows all Dutch people are redheads.

Nearby, the 1890 woodblock print "Magic Lantern Comparisons: Foreign Travel" has a traditional Japanese feel in its careful detail, except that the woman in it is wearing Western dress and reading a Western book.

If cultures meet peaceably here, in the next print they clash. Utagawa Yoshiiku's "The Battle of the Currencies," from 1873, is a hectic satirical cartoon from Japan's Meiji period. Warriors with coins for heads battle in "a metaphor for the character of exchange of imported and domestic goods between Japan and England," as the exhibit card puts it.

In a more internal battle, the 19th-century Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi depicts a samurai preparing to take a swing at a spider-ghost from his nightmares.

The mayhem may be powerful, but the medium is fragile. Because the exhibition contains so many works on paper, the lighting is kept low and the sensitive art is carefully framed. The paper items can be displayed for only a few months, Patience Young, the museum's curator for education, said. "Then they go back in their light-tight boxes."

More sturdy are the few pieces from Korea: porcelain bottles and jars from the 19th century. They're not bold like the prints, but their pure colors and subtle patterns sit quietly in between battling currencies and the painful-looking shoes, giving the eye a place to rest.

The exhibition card reads: "These much appreciated ceramics are believed to possess an imperfect aesthetic capable of quietly stirring the heart."


What: "From the Bronze Age of China to Japan's Floating World," a new exhibition of prints, bronze, calligraphy and other works

Where: Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

When: Through Oct. 18: Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursdays until 8 p.m.

Cost: Free

Info: Go to museum.stanford.edu or call 650-723-4177. The museum is also planning an exhibition of four Chinese 20th-century ink painters (Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi, Huang Binhong and Pan Tianshou) beginning in February.