As a tonic for the relentless bad news pouring out of Pakistan, on a recent trip to New York I slipped uptown to the Asia Society. What is billed as the first major US exhibition on contemporary Pakistani art had recently opened.

Everything about the vitality of the creators, their inventiveness and bold modernism rooted in tradition was a reminder of what a rich contribution to world culture Pakistani artists have made despite the crazy conditions around them.

Curated by the renowned Saleema Hashmi, Hanging Fire Contemporary Art from Pakistan brings together works by young and established Pakistani artists in a thought-provoking assemblage.

Take for example, the exceptional Red Carpet 1 shown above by the Lahori Rashid Rana. From a distance it looks like a slightly blurred Persian carpet. It is actually meticulously constructed out of tiny photographs he made at a goat slaughter-house in Lahore. Among other things, in a modern, mathematical way, it reflected the truth of one of my favorite proverbs posted at an exhibition of old Turkoman carpets held in San Francisco last year: To weave a carpet is to dig a well with a needle. In this case, the needle is a mouse. The result is something one can ponder for a long time.

Photography plays a major role in many pieces, most obviously in the stark black and white images by Arif Mahmood. It has a role in the Mughal-style miniatures by Imran Qureshi depicting the clash of modernity and tradition (with a hint of red, white and blue for you know who). The paper pop-up scenes by Asma Mundrawala draw on popular imagery too, as do the works of London-based Faiza Butt. This reincarnation of popular art and traditional forms is wonderful: Hamra Abbas takes the winged horses with women's faces seen on thousands of trucks and turns them into a three dimensional object that gives a certain reality to a mysterious fantasy. Huma Malji brilliantly and precariously traps a water buffalo atop the Greek columns sprouting on mansions all over the country.

The most melancholy pieces, given their context, are by the great Zahoor ul Akhlaq, mentor to so many younger Pakistani artists. I remember him, at an opening of his works at Pasha's Gallery in Islamabad in the early 1990s, standing simply to the side, diffident, hardly wanting to be the center of attention even as thirty of his splendid works were eagerly imbibed by the crowd. That this gentle man was brutally murdered with his daughter Jahanara in Lahore is unfathomable (as was the more recent murder of another fine Pakistani artist, Gulgee, and his wife in Karachi). These events boggle the mind. But then so does much of what is happening in Pakistan today.

Are similarly unconventional works coming out of India today? (Did I forget to say "arch enemy" - an unhelpful and ridiculous cliche I have noticed Western journalists now use as a matter of course too.) I am not sure. Everything about these works show that wherever Pakistan is headed, its artists have not given up.