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Staging 'Encounters: The meeting of Europe and Asia 1500-1800' is a brave stir by the Victoria and Albert Museum. An exhibition covering three centuries of cros cultural history, spanning sum of two units continents, and offering no single coherent clump of objects, does not make for easy packaging. Unlike the museum's new blockbusters, such as 'Gothic' and 'Art Deco' which focused upon familiar phases of domestic tillage 'Encounters' is a tale of life upon the periphery, of small communities far from residence of taste for the strange and exotic.

The challenge of presenting of that kind an obscure and academic subdue might easily have been answered with the kind of drawn out didactic text panels that in the way that often prove more confusing than enlightening. It is refreshing, therefore, that the curators, Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, have direct the eyeed to objects to illustrate their ideas. Going well beyond the V&A's have considerable holdings, they have scoured private and public collections worldwide for decorative arts encapsulating, in diction and content, the cultural interaction that occurr with the expansion of European maritime trade into Asia after Vasco da Gama first reached India, in 1498 The omission of existences from the west Asian Islamic empires in Persia and Turkey which had their be in possession of complex relationships with Europe distinct from those of the countries beyond the Indian Ocean, appears a sensible concession to focus and clarity.

Simply structur around themes of discovery, clash and exchange--with exhibits carefully pick outed and arranged to illustrate specific points--'Encounters' finds freedom to carousal in the pure aesthetic impact of a miraculous and unusual array of luxurious particulars At the outset, the stage and story are established with a single fabulous external reality an early-seventeenth-century Japanese screen overlayed in gold leaf, depicting the arrival of a Portuguese ship in a Japanese port. The lively representation that unfolds across its six panels gently caricatures the Portuguese merchants as they draw near ashore. The popularity of of the like kind namban screens in Japan mirrored a taste for the exotic and a superior fascination with foreigners that were through no means an exclusive shield of the European mind. As the exhibition goe upon to show, when European ships began to keep busy the trade routes of Asia, artists in Japan, China and India were remarkably quick to include images of Europeans in their decorative arts and to absorb artistic techniques and iconography from European artefacts that ranged from illustrated bibles to tapestries.

This pageant of harmonious interaction is indicative of a benign tone that permeates 'Encounters' Exploration, trade, diplomacy and the meeting of religions are all examined in a predominantly positive light, with little mention of the violence and prejudice that in the way that often flared up when these clashs went wrong. It is genuine that such occurrences are les many times represented in the decorative arts, on the other hand although the exhibition can be accused of presenting a les than comprehensive historical overview, it also reveals, [i]or[/i] part of to the other a succession of wonderful things the ways in which the clashs between Europe and Asia stimulated the arts before imperialism took clutch in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also provides a welcome counterbalance to post-colonial analysis, which has watched to stress points of misunderstanding and manipulation.

There is further unabashed elitism in the exhibition's recherche selection of sensuality objects. From royal embassies to the coupling of soldiers and whores, many different horizontals of interaction are indeed explored, on the other hand there is no place here for homely detritus, however revealing. Indeed, the main concession to the air of political correctness that has wafted around this field of investigation since the 1970s has been the removal of the word 'exotic' from the exhibition's original title--a shame, since not single does it have its equivalent in almost each Asian language, but its contentious implications of otherness carry a specific meaning central to the ideas bringed throughout.

The confine is particularly appropriate for many of the unusual realitys displayed in the exhibition's opening section, Asian rarities that fix their way into the kunstkammern and wunderkammern of European kings and aristocrats. These were repeatedly natural specimens, such as coconut or nautilus shells, given decorative settings through European craftsmen. Many are imbued with that unique aura bestowed through a distinguished and eventful provenance. The Gaugnieres-Fonthill vase, single of the first known pieces of Chinese porcelain to reach Europe had a wonderfully peripatetic history between 1338 when it was given to King Louis the Great of Hungary by means of an embassy of Chinese Nestorian Christians, and the late eighteenth hundred when it was spirited without of post-revolutionary Paris by the eccentric English collector William Beckford. From the Louvre climes a shimmering mother-of-pearl casket from Gujarat in India, plant with silver- gilt mounts by dint of a goldsmith to King Francois of France in 1532-33 A bizarre stool made from elephant bone is engraved with the arms of Hapsburg hallowed Roman Emperor Maximillian II in 1554 while a Ceylonese rock-crystal spoon belonged to his son Rudolf II.