The 2013 "Artists of Hawai‘i" exhibition at the Hono­lulu Museum of Art marks a radical departure from previous incarnations. The show had been juried by a guest curator who attempted to balance an outsider’s "discovery" of Hawaii with art-assessment skills honed in far more competitive environments. This often resulted in shows that felt repetitive; this year is, if nothing else, a fresh start that breaks this pattern.

From 341 applicants, 11 artists were selected to produce new work during the year leading up to the opening. This format is similar to the former Contemporary Museum’s biennial show (the museum merged with the Hono­lulu Academy of Arts in 2011 to create the Hono­lulu Museum of Art).

The works fall into two broad categories: highly personalized narratives and issues of culture in Hawaii. Though the results are impressive from a technical standpoint, the show is on the whole conceptually low-risk.

The exhibit is a game of surface effects, from Ryan Higa’s charmingly futile landscapes, with their communities of monsters with missing limbs and forlorn expressions, to Roberta Griffith’s painstaking ceramic simulations of doll parts and toys, weighted with symbolism of childhood and catastrophe. Amber Aguirre’s "naked fauxku" technique creates textures of cracked desert and burnt paper that embellish emotionally disturbed fist-sized masks with dunce caps and calendars embedded in their heads.

These bleak but richly detailed fictional worlds are entirely consistent with a contemporary life of media saturated by chaos, death and recurring characters performing routines of questionable meaning.

Meanwhile, Yumiko Glover’s giant distracted Japa­nese schoolgirls (floating through a world of anime and digital media fragments) and William Williams’ dead-bird landscapes also tap into this 21st-century zeitgeist of clutter and aimlessness. Williams elevates the ignoble corpses of crushed birds (found objects) to divinatory intensity, while Glover tries to cast these female figures as worship-worthy avatars of transcendence.

Both Glover’s red graphical abstractions and Williams’ rings and primitivist patterns serve to contrast death and synthetic life with elements of stark geometric minimalism, but to what end?

The work of tattoo artist Kandi Everett, photographer and model-builder John Ferdico and painter Clarence Chun leads to the same question. Their divergent projects are all unified by persistent views into private worlds. Everett pre­sents a series of triptychs that render skin folds and joints with the focus of a Renaissance anatomist, while the rest of her bodies evoke Egon Schiele’s stylizations.

Chun’s work is totally nonfigurative and has all the graphic power of a contemporary tattoo. It features hyper-precise curves and iconography that marries the aesthetics of smartphone graphics and traditional Asian fabrics. The works bring a refreshing dose of mainland swagger, backed by a complex theory of speed and geometry, but they aren’t deep. In this they connect to Ferdico’s customized model airplanes. Each model is wall-mounted like an insect specimen, its traditional markings replaced by fragments of photographed faces. Are these portraits of people with war stories that might challenge the model-builder’s obsession with history? No, they are merely students who may be significant to Ferdico but not the viewer.

Which brings us to Drew Broderick, Chris Ritson and Russell Sunabe. Like their compatriots, the works of these artists aren’t particularly generous, legible or open, but theirs is explicitly about Hawaii. Ritson’s digital reef built from issues of This Week, and populated by digital origami fish made of tanned sections of magazine flesh, exists as an intricate sculpture and psychedelic 3-D computer animation. The commentary on tourism is clear and thin but welcome, priming the viewer for Sunabe’s dark and possibly allegorical paintings.

Whether considering three boars’ heads upright in a field of what could be pahoehoe or oil-black ocean, or the biohazard-suited man holding a black rose, issues of environmental stewardship, abuse and cultural displacement are evident.

Broderick picks up on this theme with austere ready-mades, particularly a grid of "Mango habanero" potato chip bags, complete with fantasy hula girl and cartoon lava blasts, that obscures an actual 1800s Volcano School painting on loan from a private collector. Clearly, Hawaiians haven’t controlled the image of their land for centuries.

Now that we are wallowing in crass commercial representations, this is the point where contemporary art is supposed to intervene. The museum has tried a new strategy for presenting compelling artistic responses to life on these islands. This might not be the art we want or need, but it is what we deserve.