While it remains closed for a major rebuilding program, SFMOMA is maintaining an adventurous series of off-site exhibitions and events. Opening this weekend at the Asian Art Museum, a new show asks, “what does ‘gorgeous’ mean to you?”

A selection of 72 artworks drawn from the collections of the Asian Art Museum and SFMOMA, Gorgeous invites visitors to confront the extremes and the ambiguities of beauty. Spanning more than 2,000 years and organized into loose groupings (including "Seduction," "Fantasy," and "Danger,") Gorgeous reaches beyond beauty, a subject that has occupied philosophers and artists for centuries. But this show is about more than that.

"We're more interested in the outliers," says Allison Harding, the assistant curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum. "Exaggeration or kitsch have a way of provoking people to think about what their personal boundaries are, and what their assumptions and preconceptions are. That visceral reaction is part of the work."

Left: Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Futago), 1988; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Vicki and Kent Logan; © Yasumasa Morimura; photo: Ben Blackwell. Right: Marilyn Minter, Strut, 2004-2005; Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase: gift of Johanna and Thomas Baruch, Charles J. Betlach II, Shawn and Brook Byers, Nancy and Steven Oliver, and Prentice and Paul Sack; © MarilynMintner.

To encourage that visceral reaction, the show's organizers have taken a different approach to the text and panels that go with the exhibit, making it more conversational and less scholarly.

"A lot of times when we go to museum, we glance at the work and really look first at what the curator has to say," says Harding. "It's really different for the Asian putting the emphasis less on context and putting it more in the visitor's camp."

Gorgeous centers on the viewer, agrees Caitlin Haskell, assistant curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA; she also wrote an essay for the show's catalog entitled "Just Looking."

"With modern art in conversation with ancient objects, you don't have to be quite so concerned with cultural context," adds Haskell. "It's about letting the work work on you and just engaging with the object."

Some of those objects include the torso of a female deity from India, Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles, an elaborate Burmese Buddhist bowl, and a painting by Mark Rothko.

This is a welcome change in approach, and one that can also be seen at the Sigmar Polke retrospective on view at New York’s MoMA through August 3, where labels have been banished altogether. The result is a much richer viewing experience, in which visitors, myself included, let the art speak directly to them, reaching into their own experience to unfilter its meaning. A handy newsprint guide helps to fill in the blanks.

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the museum will throw a party on Friday night, "Grit and Glamour," complete with nail art, DJs, and a runway show of voguing to kick off Gorgeous. Like the show, Harding notes the party encourages people to jump right in.

"It's sort of a one-night microcosm of what we want to create with the exhibition," Haskell says. "In my eyes it's about experience and participation. San Francisco has so many different cultures and the party brings a lot of elements together."

Gorgeous is on view June 20 through Sept. 14, 2014, at the Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA. Information. Tickets are $10-$15, free for members and children 12 and under. The opening night party on June 20 from 7pm to 11pm, "Grit and Glamour," is $20-$25. For tickets, call 581-3531.