From Here to Serenity: Sackler's Asian Garden Tour

The flower beds depicted in small East Asian paintings are so crisply structured, and also so symmetrical, that they're hard to tell apart from tiled floors or rugs.

That preference for right angles, symmetry and order fades as one moves eastward across China, and has been pretty much abandoned by the time the exhibition gets to Japan.

Though still peaceful, and still holy, the gardens there partake of another kind of beauty. There transience is a virtue. In the gardens of Japan the withering of a plant is as worthy of contemplation as its blooming. The cherry blossoms' loveliness is not less significant than the sudden gust that sends those pale petals flying like snowflakes through the air.

One great three-panel screen on view, "Persimmon Tree" by Nakamura Hochu, makes this point of view explicit. It's as if the artist didn't paint that old and twisted branch, but rather let his bleeding inks, pooling on the paper, conjure it before us of their own accord.

The gardens of Japan don't strive to prolong spring. They embrace all the seasons. A sunny summer day, of course, is lovely in Japan, but a gray and wet one, when heavy drops of rain beat upon the leaves, and splash on the stone lantern, and shatter the reflective smoothness of the pond, is considered just as fine. In one Meiji era painting here by Ogata Gekko, the garden that the viewer is invited to admire is buried under snow.

"Persimmon Tree" by the Japanese artist Nakamura Hochu.(The Freer Gallery of Art)

In Japanese and Chinese art, stony, wooded slopes, where foaming freshets rush and gnarled roots clutch the rocks, are about as close as you can get to what might be called heaven. There sages go to meditate. There the immortals dwell. The venerated rocks one sees in Japan's temple gardens partake of that holiness. So, too, do the sands whose raked lines call to memory the grandeur of the sea. The supplicants who, kneeling, weed the moss beds there with tweezers do that humble labor as a kind of prayer.

The Sackler and its neighbor, the Freer Gallery of Art, have too much in their storerooms to ever show it all. Massumeh Farhad, the chief curator who picked the art for "East of Eden," has used the opportunity to bring to our attention works of art from the collection that we seldom get to see.

In a time of wind and slush, "East of Eden" also points the mind toward spring.

East of Eden: Gardens in Asian Art is at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. through May 13. For more information, go to http://www.asia.si.edu/.