PARIS — When you’re out for a sightseeing walk down the Champs-Elysees, Louis Vuitton’s glittering palace of luxury goods stands out like a beacon. What’s less noticeable, however, is that around the corner from the flagship store is the company’s gallery, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton. Currently on view is “The East Without Borders: From Beirut to Beijing in the Tracks of the Yellow Cruise,” an exhibit that combines contemporary art with the history of travel — and a dash of early 20th-century marketing efforts.

In the building’s lobby, informative wall text and a map explain the arc of the exhibit, which continues in the upstairs space. In 1931, André Citroën, maker of the automobiles, designed a challenge for his rugged vehicles. It was the ultimate road trip: from Beirut to Beijing, a route that included passes through the Himalayas, the Mongolian steppe, and portions of desert.

For this adventure, Louis Vuitton designed canvas bags and metal cases that attached directly to the Citroën vehicles. The bags, cases, and one of the original Citroën halftrack vehicles — on display in the lobby of the Espace — have a military look, though they were made entirely for commercial purposes. A thin cot with faded fabric is placed in its full, extended position, with its legs standing in the Louis Vuitton case into which it can be packed. (It looks significantly less comfortable than the modern version for sale inside the store.)

Though essentially a promotional tool for Citroën, the journey also introduced a technological advance to the public. The only journalist on the trip — the chief of the foreign editorial staff of the National Geographic Society, Maynard Owen Williams — sent daily wireless transmissions, allowing the progress to be followed by radio around the world.

To see how this plays out in contemporary art terms, guests take an elevator upstairs to the gallery. (Your ride up features an elevator interior created by Olafur Eliasson — “Your Loss of Senses” (2005) is a narrow carriage shrouded in black with no lights. Only an errant cell phone can disrupt the experience.)

The elevator deposits you at the gallery space, where curator Herve Mikaeloff has essentially turned the Yellow Cruise inside out. Instead of sending Western eyes to explore the terrain from Lebanon to China, he asked artists from the countries along the 1931 route to create works that express their respective nations.

While some of the works are direct statements, the range varies as widely as any collection of contemporary art can. What greets visitors is Baghdad-born Adel Abidin’s parody of a travel agency. A small video screen shows a child scooping up tiny stones with a plastic spoon. A sign reads: “Welcome to Baghdad” in hot-pink commercial script. Another video screen shows a 7-year-old girl learning words, such as “an explosion” and “no electricity,” that are now part of the vocabulary of children in Iraq. No agency would promote these scenes, but as the artist writes: “The idea of the travel agency is to provoke the spectator into living the same strange experience I went through in my own town.”

The unpleasant realities that arise from imagined observation are also part of the work of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, a team from Beirut. Together, they produced digitally manipulated photographic postcards of their hometown for their work “Wonder Beirut.” The postcards start with typical images of sunny vacation photographs, but they progress into fiery scenes of bombing and destruction. Which is the reality? By contrast, Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong created direct representations of life in Guangzhou for his work “Ink City.” Starting with digital snapshots of people on subways, sidewalks, and street corners, the artist then painted 300 traditional watercolors using Chinese ink on rice paper. Several were combined into a video that creates a fast-moving, crowded feeling.

If any of the artists take an overt slap at the current world order, it is Bita Fayyazi, born in Tehran, where she lives and works. In a small room, dozens of small toys — dolls, animals, and umbrellas — are covered in pale camouflage material. The toys are scattered in, around, and above a life-size, red Citroën. Behind it slumps a giant camel with a long hose emerging from its leg, leading directly into the gas tank of the car.

Ms. Fayyazi’s piercing installation comes at the end of the exhibit’s long, winding path, and puts the original expedition in a sharply different context from its starting point.

Until April 27 (60 rue Bassano, at 101 Avenue Champs-Elysées, 33-1 5-357-52 -03).