The Metropolitan Plays Its Asia Card : Art: The New York museum opens 18 galleries running the length of two city blocks that will showcase South and Southeast Asian works.

Sometimes it seems that every time you think “culture,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has launched another wing. Today, the museum opens what experts are calling the finest and most extensive collection of South and Southeast Asian art in the West, with some 1,300 objects displayed in 18 new galleries that run the length of two city blocks.

“It’s not a wing,” corrects Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s director. “They’re galleries.”

Wing or not, by any standards the 15,000-square-foot display is impressive and will likely draw attention to arts that have long been ignored in this country. “By opening 18 galleries in one shot and by virtue of its location within the Metropolitan Museum,” says Vishaka Desai, director of New York’s Asia Society Galleries (which has no room to display its own notable permanent collection), “I believe that this will put South and Southeast Asia on the map in an unprecedented manner.”

At the same time, to begin to tell its story, the display must span 5,000 years, scores of cultures, and according to today’s map, a dozen different nations, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, Tibet to Indonesia.

No other section of the museum covers as much geography and time. The overall size of the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for the Arts of South and Southeast Asia is roughly half what the same museum devotes to a single country in a single century--19th-Century France.

“Ever since its founding in 1870, it has been the mandate of the Metropolitan Museum to collect art encyclopedically,” says De Montebello. “When we began, the emphasis was on archeological material and Western art. These new galleries are the last letter of the encyclopedia. Now we’ve got the whole globe under one roof.”

“It is amazing that it has taken the Metropolitan so long to acknowledge the impact of these cultures,” says Pratapaditya Pal, senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has 4,000 square feet to display its own impressive collection. “This is difficult for me to admit, but there is no question that numerically and in terms of overall quality the Metropolitan’s is the number one collection of its sort in America.”

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The fact that the art of India and Southeast Asia was chosen as the last letter says more about the tastes of collectors and the biases of art historians than it does about the cultures represented here. The cultural development of these artforms does not fit the neat delineations between West and East that art historians crave.

In the first gallery devoted to ancient sculpture from Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, works show clear links to the art of the Persians, Greeks and Roman--even a small statue that may remind some of the “Venus of Wilendorf,” the mythic starting point of Western art history.

The further forward in time one goes, the less useful Western references become. In the various painting traditions of North India, Nepal and Tibet, a compositional complexity may suggest both early Renaissance painting and abstract Modern Art, without having anything to do with either lineage.

In the process of attempting to delineate artistic high points of these cultures, the display in effect traces the complex development of religious thought from nature worship through Hinduism and Buddhism, and their spread throughout the Eastern world, ending with the king-worship of the Khmers, who built the ancient city of Angkor Wat in present-day Cambodia.

“This is an entirely new museum,” says Martin Lerner, the Metropolitan’s curator of South and Southeast Asian art. When Lerner was hired in 1972, the collection contained fewer than 55 items. One of the high points, according to experts, is a room of bronze and cooper sculptures of the Chola Dynasty of South India (900-1300).

This material, according to Steven M. Kossak, assistant curator, displays a fusion of naturalism and metaphor unparalleled in Western art. Of a statue of the goddess Parvati, he says, “This sculpture is composed of a series of metaphors for nature. Parvati’s arm, for example, is just like the trunk of an elephant, but the two references come together so as to create a totally convincing portrayal.”

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Designed by Jeffrey L. Daly, the galleries are housed in rooms previously designated for temporary exhibitions. One half is composed of what had been a single 200-square-foot space referred to as “the bowling alley.” The current configuration has been seven years in the making, and was financed with a $10-million donation from Florence and Herbert Irving, who have also donated or earmarked for donation some 50 works from their collection.

One of the first Indian works to enter the museum’s collection was a massive and highly ornate domed ceiling from a 16th-Century Jain meeting hall in Gujerat carved of teak wood with intricate friezes of kinnara musicians, dancers, weapon-bearers, peacocks and mongooses fighting snakes, and ashtadikpalas --the eight regents of the directions. The ceiling had been on display in the museum from the teens until the 1950s.

When Lerner came to the museum, however, nobody seemed to know what had become of it. Eventually he located it disassembled into more than a thousand pieces in a museum storage facility under Riverside Drive, beside the place where the city stores some of its sanitation trucks. “When I first saw it,” he says, “there was an accumulation of pigeon residue--it must have been 10 or 15 years worth.”

Curators across the country hope that such neglect is a thing of the past. Unlike Western painting, which from the Renaissance through the 19th Century is virtually impenetrable for a new collector, there is still room in the field of South and Southeast Asian art. Accompanying the acquisition of art from these countries are also ethical issues of provenance, laws restricting deportation or antiquities and recent reports of pillaging at important historical sites in Cambodia. (The Metropolitan has followed UNESCO guidelines, which forbid purchase in Eastern countries.)

“In Los Angeles there are a thousand collectors of boring contemporary art,” Pal says, “all with the same sort of stuff by the same sort of artists and not a single collector of Indian art, even though the Los Angeles County Museum’s greatest holdings are in Indian art.” Of the New York opening, he said, “Maybe this will be the turnaround for them.”