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Can there have been a first Aboriginal work of art? Yes and no, and Asia Society gives it a room to itself, but against a backdrop of churning waters projected on the walls. These are ancestral waters, and painting itself has a history without a beginning, in ancestral practices—and, an exhibition explains, in “patterns of the ancestral land itself.”

That conjunction, of practices known only to clan and community but there for all to see, guides “Madayin,” eighty years of Aboriginal Australian bark painting, through January 5. The title means both the sacred and the beautiful, which is to say both a ritual and (oh, dear) fine art—and that 1935 point of origins has a back story as well as a backdrop. A white investigator had taken up the cause of four men in prison for murder, and Wongu Munuŋgur thanked him with a painting. Aboriginal painting had long worked in sand and on bare skin, but now it became reddish-brown pigment on eucalyptus bark. It became, too, the conjunction of the timeless and timely. Painters have been asking just how much to call it theirs ever since.

They live in Yirrkala, about halfway along Australia’s remote northern coast, and Asia Society supplies a map. The Yolŋu “knowledge holders” who curated the show were not entirely comfortable with that. To them, what a scientist might call a reference frame or a colonizer a navigational aid is a betrayal. The Yolŋu themselves had no written language, just a multiplicity of spoken languages, until Europeans showed up. To this day, artists refuse to adopt the patterns of other clans—not, they insist, out of scorn but out of respect. If all this “primitive art” starts to look the same, do bear that in mind.

If it still looks much the same, it will always take the long view. That opening work rests on the floor like Native American tapestry, while other work hangs vertically with dominant vertical fields. They afford space for ancestral beings, including snakes, sharks and men. Fish might be swimming upward as if swimming upstream. They might also be swimming into a trap, part of the myths and patterns at play, too. Layered on top in thicker pigments, often white, are rocks and clouds.

These are sacred spaces, and they articulate gurrutu, or kinship. More precisely, they picture a kinship system, encompassing art, country, and the environment—or lands, stories, and fire. Short diagonals dart back and forth against the verticals. Everything runs freely, supplying points of unrest and stability. These artists could not draw a straight line with a ruler if they tried. But then that would be mapping.

Museums have made a point these days of hanging long-past art beside contemporaries, like the Met with Japan, Korea, and Tibet. Contemporary art sells, and board members are collectors. It makes sense, though, when a people refuses a time line or a map. Asia Society draws on the show’s partners, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre in Australia, along with new commissions. It also starts all over again one floor up.

The restart introduces women. They began to paint in the 1930s, too. Forms in their hands become larger and more prominent, like a starlit sky for Nyapanyapa Yunupinu. (Could this be the Yolŋu Starry Night?) They show humans as active today or all but eliminate them on the way to abstraction. And then comes one last room for half a dozen contemporaries.

They recall another beginning nearly eighty years ago, in the United States. Carlene West looks to the Surrealism that Jackson Pollock once had to leave behind, Riko Rennie and others to geometry and color. They may send you back to the rest of the exhibition to see what, if anything, has changed as Aboriginal art enters the mainstream. From the start, one motive for painting on bark was to swap with outsiders for food and provisions, and now it has earned its place in New York. Besides, there is always one problem with seeing the world as a system: the more it grows, the more it can fall apart.

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