‘Artists of Hawaii’ installations gaze across borders

Over the past decade, the Honolulu Museum of Art’s celebrated Artists of Hawaii biennial has gone from a raucous art carnival guest-curated by an outsider to a more focused selection of artists who work directly with in-house curators.

This year curator Healoha Johnston led the effort, presenting a trio of installations by the Honolulu duo of Kaili Chun and Hongtao Zhou and individual artists Kasey Lindley of Honolulu and Kaori Ukaji of Hawaii island. The show’s overall themes embrace interconnection and the sometimes intimate, sometimes global borders between outside and inside.

Ukaji’s “Serenely Proliferating” is a labor-intensive exploration of the Japan-born artist’s body, rooted in her experience with an undisclosed illness. Large, hanging, abstract stitched pieces that evoke open wounds and cellular micrographs dominate the vertical spaces of the room.

Mixed feelings of fascination and repulsion are amplified by a low platform covered with various-sized rolls of white tissue packed like cells and drenched in red ink that seems to be spreading from the corner in a simultaneous evocation of stanched bleeding and infection.

The most powerful pieces are two sculptures made of her own peeled and red-stained flesh: one a curved strip that looks like a silver-trimmed sheet of dried muscle, the other a vertical sheet of “petals” mounted between glass plates like an oversized microscope slide. These pieces are the most shocking and compelling works in Ukaji’s meditation.

Chun and Zhou’s “Net_Work” is at first impression a staggering maze of orange and green fishing net, anchored in clusters to the floor and ceiling and zig-zagging across the walls in tight graphic bundles. The space seems impenetrable but there are navigable paths to explore, and viewers have reportedly felt overwhelmed, trapped or thrilled by the experience.

Closer inspection of the structure reveals connections made by plastic zip ties, a practical response by the artists that also emphasizes the balance of tensions they are working with. Also trapped in the network are tiny dolls of the generic type used by architects for scale in their models, whose discovery reinforces the feeling that one is Gulliver among the Lilliputians. (Zhou is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii’s School of Architecture.)

The arrangement of the nets is based on projections of dozens of maps the artists used to determine anchor points and the routes the netting would take as it crossed the room. Map data included routes and points of global shipping, air travel, immigration and contagion, as well as communications networks.

If “Net_Work” is at the large-scale, abstract end of the show’s spectrum and “Serenely Proliferating” evokes the concrete microverse, Kasey Lindley’s immersive video installation “Intertidal Grandeur” strikes an interesting balance.

Lindley completely fills the space with images from four separate projectors. Each features a sequence that combines coastal images, medium shots of surging waves, closeups of tide pools and abstract watercolor paintings. Within each moving image, animated geometric forms expand and contract to transition between video elements.

The visual experience is supplemented by a low reverberating roar, like that of distant surf, that completes this engrossing play on landscape painting, tourist fantasies and the everyday beauty we take for granted.

Each installation in “Artists of Hawaii” emphasizes a dominant “chord” of color, form, structure or motion. In this way, the three projects complement one another, making up for aspects in each that might be missing.