By RANDY KENNEDY

The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal at the Asia Society Museum in Manhattan - to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji - was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries.

“Hanging Fire,” which opens this month, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. It features the work of 15 artists, almost all of whom live and work in Pakistan. For many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world - one that has been thriving since the 1980s, despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability - it is a highly anticipated event.

“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” said Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director. “It’s a big moment.”

Pakistan’s reputation in the contemporary art world has often suffered from a simplistic conception that it is a society inhospitable to free expression. During several periods in the country’s 62-year history, its visual arts, theater and film have been hemmed in by restrictions imposed under sharia, or Islamic law, and under military rule.

But even amid the country’s poverty and turmoil - an increase in bombings and kidnappings, the deep inroads made by the Taliban insurgency even as Pakistan has become enmeshed in the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan - a network of commercial galleries, art schools and studios has flourished. And work is being made that deals head on with difficult issues like religion, political oppression and the status of Muslim women.

Hamra Abbas, a 33-year-old artist who was educated in Lahore before working for several years in Berlin, said in an interview that when she moved back to Pakistan from Germany, her work grew more sophisticated, in part because she was able to find the kind of resources artists everywhere need: affordable space, a tight-knit artistic group, a network of friends and colleagues to collaborate with and help her.

Her piece in the exhibition is a huge purplishred winged fiberglass rocking horse based on the popular imagery that has grown up over centuries of the Buraq, Muhammad’s steed. While the horse is “a culturally loaded icon,” as Salima Hashmi, the curator, notes, it is also seen everywhere in Pakistan.

Ms. Abbas, who has given the traditionally human female face of the steed some of her own features, imagines it as a kind of life-size toy, one she has climbed up on and ridden herself, though doing so too publicly in Pakistan could court dangerous misinterpretations. “You have to be careful,” she said. “The smallest things can end up being big things - you never know. And the big things no one seems to notice.”

A theme running through much of the work in the exhibition is the difference between reality comprehended close up and from a great distance.

Ali Raza, an artist who worked for many years in the United States, but returned to live and work part time in Pakistan in 2006, makes large collages using scraps of lushly illustrated advertisements and pages from art books and other publications that have been partly burned so their incongruous imagery and texts peep out from the mostly blackened paper. The tiny elements coalesce into large figurative images, in one case a doubled portrait of a man screaming, based on a newspaper picture of a violent street protest.

Ms. Mulji’s strangely stranded water buffalo grew out of her exploration of the strangeness of rampant development in a mostly underdeveloped nation. She describes Pakistan as a place existing “300 years in the past and 30 years in the future.”

In many ways the exhibition, which continues through January 3, illuminates the contradictions of Pakistani contemporary art itself and of its being recognized, especially now at such a crucial juncture in the country’s history.

“The contemporary artist symbolizes a strong hope for Pakistan,” argues Ms. Hashmi, the curator. “Those who gain a foothold in the international art discourse serve as a conduit, inviting a chance to dialogue with those inside.”


The first major survey of modern Pakistani art shown in America includes, from left, “High Rise, Lake City Drive,” by Huma Mulji; “Ride 2,” by Hamra Abbas alongside “My love plays in heavenly ways,” by Faiza Butt; and “No Two Burns Are the Same,” by Ali Raza.