Check to See if Asset Exists on Server - Asset.Refresh

We have the situation where we have assets in our java program, but in the flow of the program we don't know if the asset exists on the server or not, so we can't use the asset.refresh method because that will throw an exception that says the asset doesn't exist on the server. If we don't use the refresh method, in the case where the asset does exist on the server, and we update the asset, then we get a collision exception (collision detected on the asset being updated). Is there a way to check to see if the asset exists on the server, so that we know if we can call the refresh method or not? We couldn't find a method on the API that would do this.