Though most would agree that among all of Hawaii’s ethnic groups the Japanese are in no danger of underrepresentation, at least in mainstream historic and cultural terms, there are as many untold tales as there are individuals.

All monolithic groups decompose into complex, noisy swarms of narrative. Strong art, unlike purely commercial communication, shifts the familiar into new territories so that its audience is invited to see past history and glimpse the swarm.

Satoru Abe’s "Pathway," Brian Sato’s "Gokurosama" and Miki Nitadori’s "Reflect" each process the "background noise" of Japanese cultural influence and tune in to valuable signals that resonate with each other. All are showing at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s First Hawaiian Center space through March.

Sato’s photo documentary project about Hawaii’s nisei (the first generation of American-born Japanese) performs an act of recovery and preservation. Nitadori’s "remixes" of anonymous found photographs of Hawaii’s earliest Japanese immigrants operate like microscope slides, compressing geographic and temporal distances into a single moment for study.

Sato’s and Nitadori’s work is a bit sentimental (appropriate for the banking atmosphere), so it is a smart curatorial move to include nisei artist Abe with these younger artists. Abe is the living representative of Sato and Nitadori’s general subject, and though the work is not a radical departure from his highly flexible allegorical and almost mystical style, it demonstrates refinement that is perhaps influenced by his use of computer-driven lasers.

Abe deals with two broad areas. The first is community in relation to fundamental forces of the universe such as fire, the moon, the sun and the growth of trees. The second is death or transition. Whether arranged in wheels, positioned in pairs among the silhouettes of branches and flames or gathered in groups under a protective layer of colorful atmosphere, Abe’s abstract bottlelike figures evoke people of the past, present and future.

Obviously unified, they could be his peers, his children, or us — humanity itself. He confronts the relationship between humans and the universe through masterful use of color, texture and blending. The humble wood grain that forms the foundation of these pieces is laser-etched with swirling, branching, networking organic patterns that convey flows of time, stories and genes. These create negative space. He paints on this surface as a printmaker would ink a plate, but the process hovers there, tantalizing at the edge of two mediums.

Nitadori is doing something analogous in her project, which started with a suitcase full of family photographs of Japanese-Americans from Lahaina, Maui. She samples these images, selecting them for the emotional impact found in a gaze, facial expression or pose, and perhaps their links to her own history. She adjusts their scale and cropping and boosts the contrast to create a transparent space that she overlays with full-color patterns.

The images are directly applied to printed fabrics, combining the anonymous subject of the photograph with a pattern that not only plays with or against the viewer’s perception of the person, but associations with the pattern itself: polka dots, palaka checkerboards, strange prints of gilded-era jazz culture, European pastoral scenes and high modernist repeating geometries.

Nitadori’s figures are not identified and Abe’s are as archetypal and profound as rock art, but Sato’s are as intensely documentary and actual as he can make them. Unquestionably stunning and technically accomplished, each one is accompanied by a short piece of his writing that gives additional context. These portraits are ultimately historical statements, capturing moments with big-band leaders, octopus fishermen, authors, Abe himself, tofu makers, paniolo and workaday plantation laborers.

Many of Sato’s photos ran as a series in The Hawaii Herald, thereby reaching an audience that included the subjects themselves. His work should not be overlooked, for every recovered memory of a fallen comrade, racist incident or first kiss is exactly what is missing from our school textbooks and standardized tests.

We live in an era that threatens to erase history, or at least smear it like digital peanut butter over a society toasted by technologies that render all representations, all stories, effectively equal. These three artists resist the flattening of contemporary culture by using history, memory and the very force of their long lives to push people and ideas into topographies worth contemplating.