My favorite picture in “Shadow Play” at the Asia Society is “Village of Sayan” (1949), by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It is a picture of three Balinese dancers: two women and, in the middle, a man. The three are in close proximity; in fact, they have their arms around one another. The women are seen in profile and the man full face. His expression of dreamy sensuality is the center of focus, even more than the exotic dance costumes and makeup. The picture has a visual rhythm analogous to the rhythms of the music and dance. Cartier-Bresson’s first wife, Ratna Mohini, was a Javanese dancer; maybe that accounts for some of the intimacy – both with the dancers and the dance – that the great French photographer is able to convey.

My second favorite photograph here is Burt Glinn’s “Yogyakarta” (1969), a picture of a puppet master preparing for a wayang kulit (shadow) puppet show. Two elaborate paper puppets form a screen, through which we see their operator getting them ready. This traditional art form provides the exhibition with its title, and “Shadow Play” is an appropriate one for its intentions.

I was visiting my native Providence, R.I., 20 or 30 years ago, when an Indonesian puppet master was in residence in the drama department of Brown University. There I saw a performance he staged. In Indonesia the performances can go on for the better part of a day and a night, retelling familiar episodes drawn from long mythic cycles. Interwoven in the traditional texts, however, are comic and satiric commentaries on contemporary events in the village where the play is being presented. In Providence the traditional material was done in its original tongue, and the funny bits in English: It worked very well.

“Shadow Play” wants to show us a classical Indonesia set against a modern, or at least modernizing, Indonesia. An example of the former is “Ubud, Bali, Indonesia” (1997) by the Japanese photographer Hiroji Kubota. It is a color work in the National Geographic magazine style of untrammeled Edenic loveliness. From a height we look across at an exquisitely terraced hillside, each flooded rice paddy edged in green, we see occasional palm trees, and in one terrace two peasants with their oxen. This is the timeless Asia we are familiar with from innumerable Chinese and Japanese paintings and drawings, agricultural and traditional. The black-and-white “Balinese Market at Noon” (1953) by George Rodger (like Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum), with its unselfconsciously bare-breasted woman, is also reminiscent of the National Geographic of yore.

But the same year Kubota shot “Ubud” he took “Jakarta,” a color picture presented of Jalan Jedral Sudirman, a main boulevard in the capital of Indonesia. It is night, and we see an endless ribbon of bumper-to-bumper traffic, a sidewalk dense with pedestrians, a curtain of high-rise buildings of no discernable national style. In the upper-right-hand corner, crowning the skyline, is half of an illuminated golden-arches McDonald’s sign. This is Indonesia, but it is also both anywhere and nowhere. Rodger’s native market contrasts with “Surabaya” (2004), by the Iranian Abbas, a black-and-white picture in which three women wearing the Islamic jilbab (religious scarf) keep their heads down as they pass by upscale stores with ads for western female underwear and hair styling. The three models in bras and panties, standing in one life-sized ad, have the modern stance of Helmut Newton’s aggressive, square-shouldered Aryan bitches.

Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands and is the world’s fourth most populous country. It has substantial Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian minorities, but it is more than 80% Muslim. None of the pictures in “Shadow Play” gives any indication of sectarian conflict, but the bombing by Islamic jihadists of a tourist disco on the idyllic island of Bali a few years ago was only the most egregious example of simmering violence. The Christians of East Timor fought for independence to escape harassment, and there is much evidence of radical Islamists pressuring more moderate Muslims to adopt their fundamentalist beliefs. This background complicated my reaction to the many pictures in the exhibition of specifically Muslim activities.

Again, to contrast two pictures, “Banda Aceh, Sumatra” (1989) is a black-and-white photograph by Abbas of the Dar El Maaref pesantren, a boarding school where female students devote their time to the study of the Koran, prayer, and work. Five women in their late teens or early 20s crowd against a window, barred as if it were a prison. They are all dressed indifferently, and three have their heads covered, but none of them looks happy. Their expressions are angry, apprehensive, and uncomprehending. There is little evidence, other than the wall text, that they are students.

Last year Abbas took “Yogyakarta,” a color picture of girls in high school uniforms – including the jilbab scarf – marching military style in a drill to promote discipline among the students. The print is about 48-by-60 inches, as if it were an art photo, and the vivid red of the uniforms makes it seem that it might be. The girls wear their red pants and jackets with white gloves, and red caps over their jilbabs. They stand in a smart formation, but the large format of the print lets us see each face and the expressions all seem purposefully blank. The outfits these girls wear are more modern than those in the pesantren, and they are better organized, but to what purpose?

Abbas has taken many pictures of Muslims in Indonesia, from “Gresik, Java” (1989), a black-and-white picture of three young boys memorizing the Koran in Arabic, their sweet faces illuminated by light reflected from the pages of the open books in front of them, to “Jakarta, Java” (1989), a color picture of the enormous Istiqlal (“Independence”) mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia. A vast sea of worshipers facing Mecca recedes, wave by wave, from the bottom to the top of the photograph. We will probably be seeing more pictures of Indonesia.

Until August 21 (725 Park Avenue, between 70th and 71st Streets, 212-288-6400).