The work of Hiroshi Honda on display at the Honolulu Museum of Art is a unique and powerful means of exploring the deeply complex issue of Japanese-Americans’ internment during World War II. Though many Japanese artists created work while in the camps, Honda’s talent with watercolors, ink and graphite present emotional, innovative and very modern representations of life in the camps. Few approach Honda’s technical mastery, depth and conscious engagement with broader movements in art.

His style is a personalized hybrid, uniting traditional Japanese sumi-e, Chinese painting and the influences of modern European painters like Cézanne and Picasso. Though the lead image of the show, "Internees Gaming by the Camp Fence," may or may not be an intentional reference to Cézanne’s famous "Men Playing Cards," it definitely employs a cubist division of the visual field into multiple facets. Abstracted diamond patterns of chain link recede in the distance but also cross the viewing plane to intersect and resonate with the creases in the men’s suits and the triangular structure of their huddled bodies that extend and support the fence.

Honda’s works balance fluidity, weight and graphic power. Curves, clouds, forests, wooded hillsides and flows of atmosphere are cut by the harsh angles and crisp lines of barracks, guard towers and fence poles. This rigidity is swaddled by impressionism and a specifically Asian reverence for landscape, geography and representations of everyday life.

Staffed by military personnel and housing up to 17,000 internees, the camps were built in isolated locations in every western state from California to New Mexico, as well as North Dakota, Texas and Arkansas. Honda was seized and detained in Hawaii and later moved through many of these camps, including Northern California’s Tule Lake Camp depicted in his "Tule Lake Camp: Castle Rock, Barracks, and Guard Towers."

Honda presents relatively detailed guard towers and a trio of low barracks that ride the horizon of the painting. Above and below these architectural elements, he uses broad, abstract, watery strokes to imply brown grasses, the distant granite of the mountains and what might be the blue of a river. High above this field of expressionism is Castle Rock, rendered with a degree of detail that echoes that of the architecture in the foreground.

In many depictions of the Tule Lake camp, the barracks look like traditional Japanese villages nestled in mountains, and in other works such as "Internees Sitting and Standing Outside the Barracks," gatherings of people evoke peasant life but we know this isn’t the case. Honda heightens this tension by consistently contrasting nature’s constructions with those of man. He varies his emphasis on realistically or symbolically balancing the utter indifference of mountains, forests and animals against specific depictions of life under surveillance, in mess halls, at labor and in moments of pseudo-freedom such as gambling.

It is not explicitly indicated whether Honda, who died in 1970, painted from life or idealization, and the date range for some paintings indicates that they could have been done after the camps were closed, but this ambiguity (common in traditional Chinese painting, modern and contemporary art) contributes to the power and timelessness of the images.

Honda’s work also raises questions about the relative freedom some artists were afforded, as he wasn’t alone in representing camp life. Art in the camps ranged from gaman, a "folk" craft, to photographs that were set up by Japanese-Americans but technically taken by the guard, who was the only person authorized to release the shutter.

Given that Honda did paint consistently and that internees were stripped of most of their possessions before being "evacuated," where did Honda get his art supplies in such an austere environment? Did he have them smuggled in? Negotiate for them? Curry favors? These are, after all, incredibly fragile works that survived harsh environmental conditions and the challenges of reintegrating into American society.

Similar to the way the blues and gospel music preserved the tragic and life-affirming aspects of African-American slave culture, Honda contributes to what I will call an "invisible genre" that simultaneously addresses and transcends the specifically American historical (and continuing) abuses of civil rights. Viewed today, Honda’s work connects to the reality of "disaster relief" trailer parks, prison labor facilities and what some conspiracy theorists believe is the fate of dissenters if Barack Obama is re-elected president.

Honda’s work is a testament to the strength of the human spirit possessed by internees and camp personnel who "looked the other way" or otherwise supported his efforts. This was a time when people on both sides of the fences, in guard towers and Pentagon offices, truly believed that a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was possible if not imminent. Honda demonstrated that rampant fear, uncertainty, confusion and irrationality can be tamed by artistic vision and converted into much more useful forms that bear witness to and outlast the conditions under which such chaotic emotions developed.