The new show “Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the World” at the Rubin Museum of Art is, as all the shows at the new museum have been, beautifully presented, visually exhilarating, and calculated to stimulate viewers’ interest in the Himalayan cultures that produced the work. The current show is additionally thought-provoking, however, because it is being mounted amid intense controversy.

Critics, including many Tibetan groups, have challenged the show, whose treasures include painting, metalwork, jeweled ornaments, and silk-applique from a range of historical periods and geographic areas. They argue that institutional collaboration by American museums with the current Chinese regime in Tibet serves to improve the image of the current Chinese government in Tibet and distracts the public from the Chinese authorities’ destruction of Tibetan culture.

Further, the critics warn, the objects in this show have often been presented by Chinese institutions as material evidence for the Chinese government’s political claims in Tibet – namely, that Tibet has always been a part of China. Objects such as massive state seals in precious materials, documents in elaborate calligraphy bestowing honorific titles, and statues in gold-adorned metalwork were sent as gifts from Beijing’s emperors to Tibetan religious leaders. PRC cultural organs argue that these objects reflect Tibet’s status as a vassal state in a historically continuous Chinese empire.

In truth the show at the Rubin, however, emphasizes other concerns, primarily the cross-cultural hybridity and geographic sweep of Himalayan art. On entering the show, the viewer is led into an audience with an intimately scaled but compelling 13th-century metalwork statue of King Songtsen Gampo, Tibet’s great 7th-century ruler and first institutional patron of Buddhism. Behind him is a fabulously surreal painting of the dawn of Tibetan pre-history, showing the mythic origin of the Tibetan people from the union of two Buddhist deities temporarily manifesting as a compassionate monkey and a sexy rock-ogress.

The show moves skillfully from the intimate scale of objects such as these to the vast scope of the Himalayan plateau and beyond. The Museum clearly hopes to expand public understanding of the art of the Himalayas, moving from the category of “Tibetan” to a broad notion of “Himalayan” art, in which the vast cultural and geographic scope of the show’s imagery and ideas can be fully explored.

Objects in the show are all from collections in Tibet, but they range in origin from workshops in Beijing to Mongolia, Central Asia, and Nepal. Some imagery in the show comes from even farther a field, with hints of Persia and the Silk Road appearing in the unusual shapes of flowers and layout of paintings. Throughout this visual melange, the visitor senses the depth of cross-cultural exchange and influence occurring across the Asian continent, long before modern travel made this (comparatively) easy.

Special delights of the show include a 3-foot-tall, golden-metalwork lotus flower, its open petals marvelously elaborated with Buddhist deities and ornaments. Seated in its center is the wrathful, bull-headed deity Vajrabhairava, who personifies an enlightened wisdom that can terrify death itself. Several paintings and slit-silk portraits of Buddhas and Buddhist teachers are massive in scale and illuminated with the brilliant colors that are a hallmark of the Tibetan and Himalayan artistic vocabulary.

More subtle moments include a lovely metalwork sculpture of the female Buddha Tara, who embodies the liberating activity of all the Buddhas and who is for millions of devotees in Tibet and beyond an infinitely saving mother figure. This particular Tara, her face delicately thoughtful, is particularly lifelike and seems attuned to those who call upon her. In this instance she is special for a further reason. The statue appears to be Mongolian, an unusual visual link connecting the far-flung outskirts of the Tibetan-influenced Himalayan Buddhist world.

This show is by no means exclusively a show of “Buddhist art.” It presents the art of a wide nexus of regions and cultures and includes some extraordinary pieces of a more secular nature. An iridescent, glowingly green-and-blue jacket may top the list here, especially when the visitor realizes that the garment is woven from silk and peacock feathers. Gold-worked pitchers set with turquoise and huge blood red lumps of coral also claim attention, as does a beehive-shaped helmet entirely crusted with tiny seed pearls.

Nevertheless, a hallmark of Himalayan art is its religious inflection – often Buddhist but also including imagery from another major tradition, Bon. (Bon shares many ideas and images with Buddhism but is rooted in a pre-Buddhist indigenous mountain religion.) The glorious paintings, sculptures, and textiles in this show are often “religious” in subject matter. They depict Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (those “enlightenment heroes” who have vowed to bring all beings to liberation before themselves), religious teachers, and famous cycles of teachings such as the Kalachakra Tantra.

Ultimately, the show highlights the importance of Tibetan religious leaders and Tibetan cultural and religious vocabulary for people and societies far across the Himalayan plateau and beyond. For example, two luminously beautiful silk-worked textile images of Shakya Yeshe, an important Tibetan lama from the powerful Gelugpa school, were produced at the Imperial Workshop in Beijing in the mid-15th century.

These pictures show the extent to which multiple imperial courts, those of Mongolian and Manchu dynasties especially, were themselves influenced by and devoted to Tibetan religious and cultural forms. Pieces from Mongolia, Nepal, and from the Xixia ethnic group (pushed into the Tibetan area by the armies of Genghis Khan) similarly show the powerful impact of Tibetan ideas and forms, as well as the free-for-all appropriation and reworking of these ideas and others from local cultures and places far off on the Silk Route.

This creates imagery that is related to Tibet yet different – the multifaceted “Himalayan art” of the Rubin’s mission.

Until May 8 (150 W. 17th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-620-5000).