“Infinite Line,” Sarah Sze’s midcareer solo show at Asia Society Museum, promised a new angle on Ms. Sze’s mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations. And it delivers one, though the art — much of it made for the occasion — doesn’t always rise to the challenge.

The show makes the case that Ms. Sze, who is Chinese-American, has been profoundly influenced by many forms of Asian art. It also emphasizes her drawings, which have rarely been exhibited, and encourages you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings in space.

Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle caps and other throwaway objects that she fashions, with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling landscapes and galactic spirals. Over the years viewers (myself included) have had a tendency to focus on all of this stuff — to see Ms. Sze’s art as embodying a quintessentially American consumerism.

“Infinite Line” presents a more nuanced, intellectual and worldly artist: one who talks about space like an architect and vision like an ophthalmologist, who rhapsodizes about the shifting perspective in Chinese painting and makes her own Asian-inspired drawings on long scrolls of paper. One who sounds, in short, like the MacArthur grant recipient and Yale graduate that she is.