“Asia’s rise is accelerating at an unprecedented speed,” Asia Society president Vishakha Desai writes in an introduction to the work of contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan. “The shift of global economic and political power from an Atlantic community to a Pacific community,” she continues, “will be steady in the 21st century. … Today, we [at the Asia Society] need to prepare Americans and Asians to become stronger partners, creating a new framework for our increasingly inter-connected future.”

The hybrid results of that partnership and increasingly inter-connected future — at least as far as art goes — are patently evident at the Asia Society, where “Zhang Huan: Altered States,” the first-ever museum retrospective of the artist, opens today.

Mr. Zhang, who was born in An Yang, Henan Province, China, in 1965, has moved from his country’s rural slums to Beijing, to New York, and, most recently, to Shanghai, where he operates a large Warholian studio-factory that employs dozens of assistants. He has also moved from performance and body art to large-scale sculpture; from poverty and obscurity to global stardom.

Mr. Zhang’s performance art pieces have been staged in New York and across the country over the last decade. But we have never been offered this much of his art at one time. “Altered States,” a dense 55-work show curated by Melissa Chiu, is arranged chronologically and includes art from the last 15 years. It offers videos and photographic documentation of his body art and performances (which he has since abandoned for sculpture), as well as large-scale sculptures, carved wooden-door wall reliefs that incorporate Chinese photographs, and an informative documentary video about the artist, his process, and his studio.

I highly recommend that you begin the show by watching the six videos of the artist’s performances. Running in a loop just outside the entrance to the exhibit, they total approximately 45 minutes, and give you, in a nutshell, what has made Mr. Zhang such a global sensation. What you will encounter in the performances — as well as throughout the show — will be not much that is novel or even aesthetically strong, but the works will help you to understand how conceptual art can be recycled and made exotic through cultural interchange.

In the performance “12 Square Meters” (1994), Mr. Zhang stripped nude and covered his body with a viscous liquid of fish oil and honey to attract flies. He then entered a filthy public toilet in Beijing, sat for an hour, and then submerged himself in a nearby pond. In “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995), the artist and nine friends stripped nude and, lying down, stacked themselves in a pyramid on top of a Chinese mountain to add one meter to its height. In 1998, Mr. Zhang, in the crowded courtyard of P.S.1, lay nude, face-down, for about 10 minutes, on a Chinese bed whose mattress was made of ice. Dogs, having been tethered to the bed, barked and jumped nervously. In “My New York” (2002), Mr. Zhang dressed up in a muscle suit made of raw beef, which made him look as if he were a flayed Incredible Hulk, and released white doves in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Some of these performances — many of which include nudity, clapping, barking, and chanting — are interesting to watch, to a point. In one, the artist, sitting in a baby pool in a Seattle museum, is pummeled with bread by dozens of nude men and women who stand above him on a three-tiered scaffold. But the performances, like most of Mr. Zhang’s art, come across as confused and ambiguous therapeutic exercises or exorcisms. The artist appears to be attempting to cleanse or to free himself through his work, but there is little there to attract me beyond the exhibitionistic spectacle.

Almost all of Mr. Zhang’s large-scale sculptures are self portraits. They include giant copper appendages, such as a leg with the artist’s head emerging from the heel of the foot, enlarged from tiny fragments of Buddhist sculptures (fingers, toes, arms, legs) that were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Also on view at Asia Society are flags and sculpted portraits made of ash, which Mr. Zhang collects from a temple in Shanghai. One of the ashen heads, whose long ears, as if jointed, bend and support it like paws of a sphinx, weighs 2 tons and is over 12 feet high. Size, material, and the how-did-they-do-that factor are really all the piece has going for it.

That is why I also recommend that you watch the documentary video, which was filmed in Shanghai. In it, you will see Mr. Zhang’s assistants, with very little direction from the artist — who moves beautifully, authoritatively, and mysteriously through the film with a cigarette dangling from his lips — produce some of the artworks in the show.

Some of the assistants are very skilled craftsmen, especially the woodcarvers. Their work on “Memory Door Series (Meeting Table)” (2006) is one of the few examples in “Altered States” that I found something spatially magical. In the piece, a large photograph of a room with a table and chairs has been adhered to an antique Chinese door, and parts of the image have been carved into bas-relief. The carved tabletop and chairs feel elastic, pulling the space and giving the work a centrifugal force.

At Asia Society, we can see how globalization has homogenized art. Mr. Zhang’s work does not really seem to represent the individuality and makeup of a Chinese artist but, rather, something Frankensteinian. Mr. Zhang works within the tradition of early feminist performance-artists, as well as body artists such as Chris Burden who practiced self-mutilation. Yet this is only one reason why Mr. Zhang’s work feels stale. In the show’s documentary video, one worker remarks that, because of production costs, it would be impossible to make the large-scale sculptures anywhere but in China. This is possibly true, but it would also be virtually impossible to market the sculptures anywhere but here in the West, a point the film neglects to make. A global product of our “inter-connectedness,” Mr. Zhang’s art, peppered with Chinese sources, is an Asian fusion of Buddhism, performance art, body art, and Conceptualism. It is Western art made in China.

Until January 20 (725 Park Ave. at 70th Street, 212-288-6400).