The Crow Collection of Asian Art’s space, divided into three floors connected via elevator, often makes you feel as if you’re rising to the heavens. With the Crow’s current exhibition, “Wild Flowering,” where a few hundred jade objects of the Crow Collection are on display on the ground floor and mezzanine, that ascent feels even more like transcending earth for sky. Up above, on the third floor, “Yeohlee: Design for Now,” with its cowled fabrics, stands as a contrast to the jade below.

Yet the craftsmanship of the jade artisans can make jade look as flimsy as lace, as translucent as ivory, and as fragile as glass. Still, no matter how ephemeral seeming it is, jade is durable. In “Miniature Mountain” from the Qing dynasty, a mountain scene shows monks, houses, stairwells, a bridge, and trees all inset into a sizable chunk of stone (14 x 17 x 4 ½ in). Bowers of ivy and forest cover, as well as a jutting boulder, foreground the scene, creating a barrier between the internalized picture and the external world.

On a smaller scale, “Spider and Cidadas on a Leaf” shows two greenish cicadas and a tiny spider set atop a leaf. The leaf is golden in color while the cicadas and spider have a marbled green and white color. Their feet, however, match the umber of the leaf, blending into it. It is a delicate piece, creating a standoff between the defenseless but tenacious spider and the offensive cicadas. The leaf their battleground, the future of this skirmish favors the cicadas.

In this delicate dance between creatures, jade’s hard rigidity becomes supple. Perhaps, for this reason, “Yeohlee: Design for Now,” does not feel out of place with the downstairs exhibition. Yeohlee’s clothes, made from fabric geometrically cut and layered piece over piece, create minimum waste. Using these geometrical forms and sustainable methods, she has created clothes that seem futuristic and yet appear timeless. The monochromatic nature of her clothes—black, grey, white—is offset by a disassembled red skirt that, like varying kite shapes, has been suspended in the walkway between “Blossoming Stone” and the Tibetan gallery. The skirt seems almost like that elusive red balloon of the eponymous story—ever ascending, never caught.

Yeohlee’s clothing and their dramatic, angular cuts in some ways point out the ways in which clothing can seem harder than it is. Even if Yeohlee’s materials are soft, the triangles, squares, and circles hint at something rudimentary and rock-solid: the archetype of forms. Perhaps the concept behind a designer’s cloth is similar to that of the jade cutter’s design. Both tackle their material with a cut in mind, and both ultimately see a transformation wrought in the material they use.

Jade and fabric make a fitting contrast to each other in the Crow’s “Wild Flowering” and “Yeohlee: Design for Now.” The two exhibitions trace an ascent from the strong structures of stone to the ephemeral, ethereal quality of fabric. Cloth billows in air, and stone bugs seem to float on a jade leaf.