A WEEK AND a half ago, the Seattle Asian Art Museum finally introduced contemporary art into its hermetic confines, and it did so with a bang. The breakthrough piece was a performance by Zhang Huan, which climaxed with some 50 naked people screaming and throwing bread rolls at the artist's head. Whatever the piece meant -- and it did have some meaning to it -- it was a positive gust of fresh air at Seattle's least interesting museum.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) is a tomb dedicated to Richard Fuller, who founded the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in 1933 at the Volunteer Park pavilion, which now hosts SAM's extra-vowelled annex. At that time, Fuller focused SAM's collection on premodern Asian art, as well as on current Seattle painters: Tobey, Graves, Callahan, et al. The museum's longtime curator of Asian art, the recently retired Bill Rathbun, shared Fuller's antipathy for contemporary Asian art. Actually, it wasn't so much antipathy as much as it was ignorance. For these men, Asian art neatly wrapped itself up in a shroud and died somewhere around the time the French Impressionists were inseminating art with the seeds of modernism.

That museum has largely recovered in the post-Fuller years, devoting considerable resources to modern art and placing the modern art curator at the top of the curatorial totem pole. But SAAM, its annex in Volunteer Park, persisted in presenting a history of traditional Asian art which came to an abrupt halt in the 19th century, as if preserving a dead language. Make a list of important 20th-century artists of Asian heritage, from Tsuguharu Foujita to Mariko Mori, and count on the fact that they've never been shown at the Seattle museum nominally devoted to their cultures. Black Sun, Isamu Noguchi's great sculpture across the drive from SAAM, is the only exception to this rule.

SAAM's blinkered view of contemporary Asia caused it to miss out almost completely on the biggest news in Chinese art in years. Inside Out, the blockbuster touring exhibition of new art by Chinese artists, got to Seattle only through the good sense of people at the Henry Art Gallery and the Tacoma Art Museum, neither of them normally associated with Asian art. Late in the game, however, SAAM finally got on board through the efforts of director Mimi Gardner Gates, co-sponsoring the performance by Zhang Huan with the Henry and offering the lovely central court of SAAM as its site.

Huan ran up against a few obstacles in staging his performance. He wanted raw meat, live fish, dead fish -- some kind of animals in the performance -- but had to settle for a truckload of bread loaves and a single raw egg, due to fears that the ancient sculptures in the court could be damaged. Still, he got half-a-hundred naked Seattleites, a huge scaffolding, and a baby wading pool into this den of antiquities, which felt like quite an accomplishment while you were looking at it.

The performers were a surprisingly wide-ranging bunch, young and old, big and small, male and female, white and Asian, with one pregnant woman and some charmingly hairy naturalists thrown in. The performance was a ritual combining elements of various religious traditions of China, along with Buddhist and Christian elements. In the climactic scene, the artist sat on a swiveling stool in the middle of a baby pool while the others threw chunks of bread at him, yelling and growling. Apparently this was meant as a purging of negative energies, and it felt like it.

At the end, Huan threw in a couple of unplanned bits: An egg was smashed on his head by his willowy accomplice (a local woman fluent in Chinese who translated his instructions to the other performers). Then the entire crew descended from the scaffolding, to be led by Huan out the museum's front doors and into the park, in the middle of a cold, drizzly night. It was a very friendly sort of transgressiveness, and it literalized the prankster aesthetic that had been bubbling underneath the poker-faced ritual elements of the performance.

All in all, this was a giant step toward SAAM welcoming the 20th century into its mausoleum, mere months before the end of that century. One hopes the incoming curator of Asian art, who is yet to be hired, will follow its lead into the 21st.