TIME was that Asia Week in New York meant one-stop shopping. You went to the International Asian Art Fair, and the who's and what's that mattered were there: dealers, collectors, curators, scholars and, of course, art. Sure, there was the odd outside show. Giuseppe Eskenazi flew in from London with Chinese sculpture that made everyone faint. But the fair, at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, was Asian Art Central, at least for that week.

Much has changed. Now Asia Week is a complicated package deal. The fair, 10 years old, is in place, seasoned and attractive, if thinner and less than electrifying than of yore. And gallery shows are all over the place. Some are put together by art fair dropouts who set up shop in rented spaces; others by Manhattan galleries that also have booths at the armory; and still others by dealers who never signed on with the fair.

The point is that to fully experience Asia Week now, you have to leave the armory and hit the streets. And this is healthy. It gets the blood going, brings in new players, spreads the energy. Besides, with China cracking down hard on ''cultural property'' exports, who can predict how the art business will go? Best to diversify, though so far, business this Asia Week seems to be going fine.

Naturally, it would have been great if the Asian Art Fair's 1996 start-up team of dealers had stayed intact. But in fact some of the team is intact, which is why the fair continues to bring surprises, and why people come back.

You walk into the show this year and the first thing you see is a nearly life-size stucco sculpture of a smiling young woman, full-breasted and nude to the waist. She looks familiar, but you can't quite place her. An uncharacteristically cheerful Venus? An unusually demure nature goddess? She's the Buddha's mother, Maya, carved in the third century B.C. in the area known as Gandhara -- now in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- where India and the Mediterranean met.

She's one of several marvelous Gandharan pieces brought by John Eskenazi, cousin of Giuseppe, another being a grave, bearded, bare-chested male who looks like Zeus but is probably the bodhisattva Vajrapani. All biceps and soul, he's pure proto-Michelangelo. But he's upstaged by two South Indian temple bronzes, absolute classics, and another rarity: a carved terra-cotta column from Chandraketugarh, dated to the first or second century B.C. and covered with loving couples, animals, demons and flowers.

Mr. Eskenazi's booth is itself an art fair classic: you drop by every year wondering if it'll blow you away again, and it does. The same goes for Doris and Nancy Wiener's display. It's particularly rich in Khmer sculptures this time, among them a small bronze statue of the goddess Prajnaparamita, the symbolic mother of us all, whose dozens of raised protective arms look like unfolding wings.

Across the way, Terence McInerney has an exquisite Mogul miniature, attributed to the artist Manohar, depicting the story of Tobias and the angel. This is a good year for painting. At Carlo Cristi, you find a Tibetan Buddhist manuscript with a picture of devotees riding a gilded go-cart to heaven. Simon Ray has a 19th-century painting of the life of Krishna, as big as a movie screen. And China 2000 brings us into the present, with brush and ink landscapes by Zeng Xiaojun done just last year.

Korean art has a strengthened presence this year, with the Khang Collection back after some seasons away. Middle Eastern Islamic art, by contrast, is sparse -- Sam Fogg didn't come from London, alas -- though several galleries with tile work and calligraphy at the Arts of Pacific Asia Show downtown, which the International Asian Art Fair is beginning to resemble ever so slightly around the edges, take up some of the slack.

The downtown fair, in the 69th Regiment Armory, on 26th Street, has an ambience very much its own: informal, neighborly, kookier even. Booths tend to be small, but so does the art, much of which is kind of a mini-version of what's uptown. And were I the collecting type, I'd be more than happy to walk away with some of what's here: a thumb-size bronze Buddha from the Dutch gallery Astamangala; or a Sumatran silk wrap from Chinalai Tribal Antiques; or a terra-cotta Tang horse -- not one of those willowy uptown thoroughbreds, but a sturdy, chunky, cheaper little mount -- from Marc Richards.

As for kooky, stroll the aisles and you'll pass a booth filled almost entirely with portable Buddhist shrines (A.&S. Ziesnitz), and another dense with Samurai gear (Robert Winter). Cedric Curien-Art Asiatique has a lifetime supply of Rose Medallion porcelain. Sagemonoya is Netsuke City. Collecting, I'm told, is about love first, ambition second. There are many definitions of ''the best,'' and you may well find yours here.

In the Galleries
If, however, you want a sense of what high end means, drop by Giuseppe Eskenazi at PaceWildenstein. Sometimes he shapes a show around a theme; this year he hasn't, which is fine. Each of the dozen pieces here, from a superlative late-Shang bronze wine vessel to a glazed Ming bodhisattva with elaborate robes and infantine face, is a show in itself. Put it in a room, turn on a light, and you have your own blockbuster. The stuff is that good.
Across 57th Street in the Fuller Building, Rossi & Rossi is setting a gold standard, literally, with ''Treasures From Mongolia: Buddhist Sculpture From the School of Zanabazar'' at Barbara Mathes. This London gallery has brought horizon-expanding art our way with awesome regularity, and is doing so again with some two dozen gilded copper images of Buddhist deities and holy men, among them the artist-monk-guru Zanabazar (1635-1723). The last comparable gathering of such work in America was in 1996 and never reached New York. Most of the Rossi & Rossi pieces sold before the show opened. You can see why.

The Fuller Building, incidentally, has become a sort of new Asia Week headquarters. There are a dozen special exhibitions in progress, and Throckmorton Fine Art, with handsome Chinese Buddhist sculptures farther east on 57th, qualifies as an off-site extension.
Still in northern Asia, Carlton Rochell has a chamber music-scale show of Silk Road textiles, the earliest dating to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.- A.D. 221). It is nothing more than a scrap, a band of woven wool detached from a woman's skirt. Yet its motif of winged horses, filled in with color like cloisonné, is so jaunty and sweet you know it must have delighted its maker. Every item here is like that: a little patch of fantastic. In its modest way, the show picks up where the Met's fantastic show ''When Silk Was Gold'' left off, and couldn't be more welcome.

Gisèle Croes has even earlier material: Chinese bronze ritual vessels from the Shang period (1600-1027 B.C.). The examples she finds are invariably either so big, or expressive, or dramatic in some way that you know instantly why these objects were, and are, such potent cultural emblems. They don't speak a language of grace. They speak of a magnetic, eye-of-the-universe, suck-in-the-light power, like the Kaaba in Mecca, or some of Richard Serra's early sculptures.

As for grace, try the Chinese ceramics at J.J. Lally. Bronzes never relax, but ceramics do. They can carry themselves lightly, as the white Song porcelains in this show do. Or be playful, like the Tang basin with a flower floating psychedelically at its center. And they can have the studied nonchalance of improvised dance, which is the impression given by an eighth-century stoneware jar half covered with dark glaze and splashed with skim-milk blue.

Japanese art conveys a similar fluid poise and fluidity, evident in shows by three galleries in the Fuller Building. One of them, Mika Gallery, moved in last year and marks Asia Week with a choice selection of early Buddhist sculptures and calligraphic pieces. The space is tiny, the exhibition style spare and clean, like that favored by Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts on 66th Street, a sterling model.

Yanagi has a show of its own, ''Arts of the Nanbokucho and Muromachi Periods,'' spanning 1336 to 1573. It includes some fine paintings, but the centerpiece, and an Asia Week highlight, is a 15th-century portable lacquered shrine with double doors front and back. One set opens on an aerial- view painting of the famous Kasuga Shrine in Nara, a Shinto foundation. The other set reveals a Buddhist reliquary in the shape of a flaming jewel, glowing with light reflected from underlying sheets of gold foil.

The Japanese specialist Sebastian Izzard has something special, too, in his show of literati paintings, produced with the London Gallery of Tokyo: a large brush and ink landscape by the artist and poet Yosa Buson (1716-84), done a few years before his death. Like the works that surround it, it channels Chinese tradition, but does something barely definable to it, in the way Mongolian Buddhist art inflects Tibetan prototypes and young artists all over the world today are discreetly riffing on art of the past.

There is too much contemporary Asian and Asian-American art in New York to touch on here, though at least one example relates more than a little to Asia Week. It's in an exhibition at Kaikodo that is otherwise a thousand-year sweep of ''classical'' Chinese painting and ceramics. The contemporary piece, a project titled ''Through Masters' Eyes'' by the conceptual artist Lee Mingwei, caps the survey by casting fixed notions of art historical tradition in doubt.

For the project, Mr. Lee made a photocopy of a famous album painting by the great 17th-century Chinese artist Shitao and asked 11 other artists, six from Taiwan and five of different cultural backgrounds based in America, to copy the image by hand, in some cases working from each other's copies. Some of the results adhered closely to the original, others departed radically from it. But in no case, whether filtered through Chinese painting, Indian miniature painting, abstraction or photo-collage, is the Shitao itself entirely lost from view.

A visit to Kaikodo's memorably beautiful space now would be a good idea; the gallery will soon relocate to smaller quarters. And for me, Mr. Lee's project -- which is much more complex than I've described it -- is an Asia Week reward, a bracing image of continuity in change, a lesson in how many ways there are to do a thing right. Oh, and speaking of right, Kaikodo has titled its show ''Renewed by Time.''