By Glen Helfand

INTERNATIONAL DRAMAS SEEM both closer than ever and much, much farther away – broadcast into your living room even as they are made inaccessible (if you take the travel industry as a gauge). Yet the art world has recently seen a proliferation of festival-like biennial exhibitions in less expected places – Havana, Istanbul, Taipei, Gwanju – that have broken down some boundaries between Western and non-Western contemporary art. It's "art world" with an accent on "world," as globalism gives curators and collectors a softer entry into foreign cultures and access to their artists, who then enter an international exhibition circuit that can pique as much interest in a Thai artist as a German one. We like that.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' current "Time after Time: Asia and Our Moment" uses this moment – in which the glee of globalism mixes with the terror of it – to exhibit 14 contemporary artists who live and work in cities in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Thailand. They engage a range of media that reflects art-school trends: video, bright plastics, conceptualism, funky sewn stuff. To my knowledge, none of these artists have ever shown before in San Francisco, long touted as an important gateway to the Pacific Rim – a position that hasn't necessarily made it rich in new art from Asia. It's great to have them here.

I was intrigued by a number of the works, selected by YBC's René de Guzman with guest curators Doryun Chong and Eungie Joo. Choi Jeong-Hwa's giant, inflatable Touch Me, with air pump-animated unfurling tendrils, is a lot of fun, as is Peng Hung-Chih's more incisive One Black/One White video from Taiwan, in which cute dogs of contrasting colors playfully veer between bowls of kibble, a great fusion of puppy love and cultural commentary. Shimabuku, a singularly named Japanese artist, shows a well-developed sense of conceptual whimsy with a series of instructional pieces from the book Shimabuku 2001, as he did in a performative work in which he gave a "hippy octopus" a tour of San Francisco. Shinoda Taro, also from Japan, contributes an elegantly modern, mechanized reflecting pool of white liquid called Milk, which is positioned in the landing path of one of two giant jet sculptures fitted in a warm skin of recycled old clothing, which might soften travel wear and tear. That piece, International Flight, is by Chinese artist Yin Xiu Zhen, who also has made a room that manages, with the aid of large photo murals, to become a facsimile of a public square in Beijing, complete with actual stools that visitors are urged to sit on.

But where are we? Even if these pieces are lively and engaging individually, it's difficult to grasp why they're presented together here. Guzman explains on the YBC Web site that "Time after Time is emphatically not about Asia, nor is it even about Asian contemporary art. The exhibition is a considered program that addresses the subject of time that, like Asia, exists with the weight and elusiveness of an idea." The group-issued curatorial statement doesn't make things any less intangible: "Works in this exhibition consider the public discourse of progress, personal investments in memory and tradition, and the coexistence of multiple systems of time." These are interesting topics but perhaps too broad for a show like this. Some works seem to address seconds ticking away, but more often, they feel like grains of sand slipping through fingers.