HONG KONG—What do a quilted handbag from the 1950s, works of contemporary art, and a UFO-shaped pavilion from a space-age future have in common? They’re all part of the latest venture in merging the worlds of fashion, art, and architectural design: Chanel Mobile Art, a groundbreaking traveling art exhibit that opened in Hong Kong on February 27, and has been drawing huge crowds ever since.

Chanel’s iconic “2.55” purse, launched by Madame Coco in February ’55, is the theme of works by 20 artists of international renown, from Yoko Ono to Stephen Shore. But the real innovation here is the show’s concept and design. To house the exhibition, Chanel commissioned Zaha Hadid, the London-based starchitect who in 2004 became the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize, to build a mobile art gallery. What she came up with is the futuristic, organically shaped white container currently perched on the roof of a car park building for what until recently was the Star Ferry terminal in Hong Kong's central business district. The gallery stays here through April 5 before taking off for stops in North America and Europe.

“It’s a three-dimensional experience brought to life on a very unique set,” says Mobile Art curator Fabrice Bousteau, a leading French critic. “It’s a sort of passing UFO that lands for a number of weeks in the middle of some of the largest cities in Asia, the United States, and Europe.”

This UFO may be mobile, but it doesn’t yet move at hyperspeed. The 2,300-square-foot Hadid structure was built in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. It weighs 180 tons and was shipped to Asia in 700 pieces, each no bigger than an inch or so thick and about seven feet wide, then assembled in Hong Kong over the course of a month. Organizers predict that it will take two weeks to disassemble and about three weeks to ship to the next stop—Tokyo. From there it will continue on a six-city tour that runs until early 2010, traveling to New York, London, Moscow, and, finally, Paris.

Inside the structure, artworks tackle the quilted handbag theme with a range of approaches. Some address it directly: Shore presents a wall of photos detailing the bag’s manufacturing process, while the provocative Russian collaborative Blue Noses has created deceptively plain large cardboard boxes containing video projections of corpulent naked Western women engaged in a variety of activities featuring a red Chanel bag (in one, a fat lady seems to glide on water, floating on a Chanel bag).

Others take more oblique approaches. The controversial and highly prolific Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Arakai contributes a film focused on a woman in chains. very much in the spirit of the erotic images for which he has become famous. French artist Daniel Buren presents a curtain made of strips of multicolor fabric, photographer David Leventhal offers three photographs depicting female faces wrapped in leather, and Ono displays a “wishing tree” where visitors can write a wish on a piece of paper and tie it to a branch. Argentina’s Leandro Erlich exhibits one of the prettiest and most crowd-pleasing pieces: a dark room where viewers look at an image of a Paris street — likely Rue Cambon, where Coco Chanel kept a flat — reflected in a pool of water as bubbles rise to the surface.

Upon arrival at the venue, each visitor is given an MP3 player with a half-hour audio guide to the exhibit. In Hong Kong the guide is available in six languages: English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, and the local dialect, Cantonese. Visitors also receive a large-format magazine containing interviews with Hadid and Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld and information about the brand. Admission is free, although bookings for time-specific tickets must be made online for a small service fee. Chanel has not released admission statistics, but according to the exhibition’s Web site, tickets are now sold out.

The show’s next engagement, in Tokyo, begins in July.