The Seattle Asian Art Museum is beautiful not only on the inside, but also on the outside, in its dramatic setting in Volunteer Park, where an Isamu Noguchi sculpture draws your eye to the city below. As you arrive at the museum, savor the natural world outside and note the magnificent doors that lead from that natural world to the world of art. Take your time.

It may look like a small museum, but there is plenty to see and reflect on at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Give yourself two hours at the very least.

If you proceed roughly clockwise as we did, you’ll begin with a Chinese exhibit called "Artful Reproductions." The name is misleading, but our confusion led us to ask a museum guard for clarification — and he turned out to be a marvellous source of information. The items on exhibit are in fact not reproductions at all, but rather cabinets, saucers, flasks, roof tiles, zodiac figures, and landscapes made production-style by multiple people in workshops. Many of these items are displayed in pairs, so if you enjoy comparison and contrast, you might spend a lot of time here.

"Art and Religion from Neolithic to Tang China" is a fascinating exhibit that includes the oldest item in the museum’s collection: an earthenware urn from the third millennium B.C.E. Of a slightly more recent amphora, our guard, who could have been a docent, remarked, "You could see that at IKEA!"

There’s a stoneware vase in "Innovations in Song and Yuan Ceramics" that was shattered and restored; see if you can find the cracks. Past the robes, vessels, and sculpture on display in "Ming and Qing: Decorative Art Supreme" is one of the highlights of the Seattle Asian Art Museum: an astonishing collection of painted, carved, jade, cloisonné, and enamel snuff bottles. Some of the tiny bottles were painted on the inside, and I wished our friendly guard had stuck around to explain this marvel, but other visitors with endless questions had probably enlisted his aid by that point.

What I remember best from "Chinese Art: A Seattle Perspective" is a stunning 2004 assembly of five scrolls by Wan Qingli called "Wishing Each Other Longevity." Zhu Qizhan’s works in ink and color on paper are also well worth a look. According to his bio, this artist achieved longevity.

The Fuller Garden Court, graced with sculpture from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is a good place to take a little rest before continuing on to "Looking West, Finding East," which includes an exhibit of paintings and sculptures by northwest masters George Tsutakawa and Paul Horiuchi.

"Live Long and Prosper" is an exhibit of auspicious motifs in East Asian art. Look for plum, moon, pine, peach, lotus, turtle, citron, persimmon, quail, deer, goats, and sheep. The Pacific Northwest is home to a large number of modern Japanese prints, and you can discover quite a few of them in "New Horizons in Japanese Prints." "Flying," Seiko Kawachi’s four-panel vision of chickens and skyscrapers, is the highlight of "Taking Flight: Contemporary Craft" and a reminder that hens haven’t been urbanites for all that long.

You’ve only got until October 9 to see "Modern Elegance: The Art of Meiji Japan," so don’t miss the paintings, scrolls, enamelware , and earthenware from the modern Japan of a hundred years and more ago. Don’t miss the lower floor, either, where you’ll probably find copies of The Asian Reporter.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum is located at 1400 East Prospect Street in Seattle. The $7.00 admission fee to the museum is reasonable indeed, but if your budget is tight these days, consider visiting the museum on one of its free days: first Thursdays and second Thursday evenings for everyone, first Fridays for seniors age 62 and older, and first Saturdays for families. To learn more, call (206) 654-3100 or visit <www.seattleartmuseum.org>.