In a city known for hype-filled events, from the Oscars and Grammys to countless Hollywood premieres, the recent opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles occupied its own stratosphere, drawing a constellation of celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams.

Many of the names at the museum’s September 19 grand opening were there to wish founder George Lucas, creator of the sprawling Star Wars franchise, and his wife, Mellody Hobson, well.

But celebrity wattage aside, the 300,000 sq ft (27,000 square metre) museum is a jaw-dropping achievement: a sweeping, futuristic structure conceived by Chinese architect Ma Yansong and a striking new addition to the downtown Los Angeles landscape.

Yansong’s design uses more than 1,200 curved fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels that make it look like a levitating spaceship, integrating a tree-covered roof and an elliptical oculus allowing natural sunlight to stream into the ground-level entry.

That a China-born architect shaped the building that houses this collection is fitting, because the story inside is very much a global one.

Before visitors reach the galleries of Star Wars concept paintings and comic-book pages, they pass through a ground-floor exhibition on the history of narrative art. There, among samurai armour from the 18th century and Chinese scrolls from the 17th, the museum makes its case: telling stories through pictures is a human habit, not an American one.

“The idea of narrative art has no geographical or chronological boundaries,” says Ryan Linkof, the museum’s senior curator. “It really is, in some ways, the oldest form of art. We use images to tell stories.”That philosophy, shaped by Lucas’ vision, gives Asian and Asian-American artists a foundational role here rather than a footnote. The ground-floor gallery gathers objects from across the world, including a 19th century Edo-period woodblock print of a Chinese story, a reminder of how tales travelled between cultures.

“A classical Chinese story had migrated into Japan in the Edo period,” Linkof says, “and become a big part of that kind of visual culture of heroism.”South and Southeast Asian works, including Hindu and Buddhist figures, show “the global ways in which deities and gods are depicted”.

Upstairs, the thread continues in the inaugural “Star Wars in Motion” exhibition, where Doug Chiang, the Taipei-born American film designer and artist who helped define the aesthetic of the Star Wars prequels, created the pod race sequences and the design of the surrounding vehicles, costumes and worlds.

Chiang’s captures the chaos of that sequence on the page, while his artwork featuring Darth Vader shows his command of one of the world’s most famous villains. The museum displays original artworks from its collection and reproductions made for the exhibition.

The manga gallery features some of the form’s most important figures, from Osamu Tezuka, whose work includes the early days of , to Eiichiro Oda, creator of the long-running phenomenon . Also on view is Takashi Murakami’s sculpture (1997), a work that shows how manga and anime imagery has moved from the page into the world of contemporary art.

These properties, Linkof says, “have become some of the most widely reproduced and circulated in the history of the world”. Of , he says: “Its reach is unbelievable. There’s really almost no comparison other than maybe Star Wars.”Many of the exhibits in the museum are part of Lucas’ 40,000-piece personal collection. Lucas has been collecting art for 50 years, but largely in an American context, Linkof says. The comics collection did not originally include manga, “even though that’s such an important tradition, that has so many parallels with American and European comics.

“So that’s been an area where we’ve been collecting over the last year or so, to really build that out,” he says.

“Asian and Asian-American artists were also just really important to a lot of these forms,” Linkof says, citing Jim Lee, the Korean-American comic book artist who is president, publisher and chief creative officer of DC Comics. “He’s profoundly important to the history of comics in the past 30 years.”The same goes for Alfredo Alcala, the Filipino artist Linkof describes as “important and prodigious”, who is represented in both the children’s illustration and comics galleries.

While the museum has a “something-for-everyone” appeal, its curators also wanted it to welcome artists who have not yet been discovered.

“We really are a museum that platforms artists who really haven’t had an institutional space, in a way that has championed them,” Linkof says. “There are a lot of artists whose art most museums either don’t collect or might have one or two examples of. But we have really robust holdings.”He encourages visitors, who have been able to explore the museum since its public opening on September 22, to wander freely: to drop in and out of the two cinemas that show films on a loop, the library, the viewing terraces and the exhibition spaces.

“There’s no prescribed path of the museum,” he says. “There can be as many reactions to this place as there are people who come to see it. But if people walk away with some understanding that images are not just passive things in the world, they are actually active agents in how we understand ourselves, that is a pretty big takeaway.”