The leitmotif of the exhibition, which is made up of three different sections, transcends the stylistic peculiarities of the different artistic traditions to highlight a general characteristic of the works on display, following one of the criteria used by the collector to collect Oriental art works: the idea of “movement” which, through the fluidity of the forms and the dynamism that characterises the actions of the characters depicted each time, emphasises their vitality, making them almost like dancing forms. The first section of the exhibition displays ancient wooden works from southern India traditionally used in distinct ceremonial contexts. The first context is that of the processional chariots, used in periodic celebrations to transport deities out of the temple in order to bless the faithful. Specifically, these are wooden panels and sculptures depicting deities, supernatural beings and animals, broadly speaking expressions of local ideologies and latent values related to the ceremony, used to decorate the floats. The second context is that of theatrical performances of a ritual character and related ceremonies, where the masks were worn by a dancer in a trance who acted as an intermediary between the gods and the community to bring them counsel, or where they were carried in a procession with the function of blessing the villagers. The second section is devoted to a group of Indonesian works used in theatrical performances of a playful and ceremonial nature. These are mainly Javanese puppets. Partly flat and made of leather (wayang kulit), they were used in the ‘shadow theatre’, the oldest form of Indonesian puppet theatre dating back over a millennium. Other puppets, this time made of wood and cloth and worked in the round (wayang golek), constitute a genre that developed from the ‘shadow theatre’, with characters often taken from the same literary sources, but staged without the use of screens on which to cast their shadows. The nucleus of Indonesian works is completed by a Balinese mask depicting Rangda, used in ritual dances. The third section of the exhibition presents a selection of Japanese woodcut prints and Indian paintings, mainly of an erotic nature, which best express the tradition of their respective centres of production between the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The exhibition is accompanied by a film about the Indonesian shadow theatre, which helps to provide a better understanding of the exhibition. The production of the works on display spans the 18^th and 20^th centuries.