Show filled with echoes of surrealism

For 36 years, the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce has sponsored "Commitment to Excellence," a juried exhibition originally organized to promote Japanese culture through the visual arts. For the first five years it presented artists of Japanese descent exclusively, but organizers recognized the necessity and value of diversifying the applicant pool.

In 1985, jurors faced the same limitations as they do in today’s local art scene: a relatively small pool of talent with access to a smaller number of exhibition spaces and the risk of falling into creative stagnation, which in turn retards the healthy development of diverse markets. There is no hidden hand at work here, it’s just the shape that emerges when island life grinds against cosmopolitan ideals.

So does the 2014 show transcend such constraints? Not completely, but it is clear that jurors made an effort to select 2-D and 3-D work that strives to point beyond clichés of tropical landscapes and pan-Asian ethnic appropriation, a goal exemplified by this year’s featured artist, sculptor Esther Shimazu.

Her realistically colored, possibly hermaphroditic ceramic figures are crafted with great precision — and are a little scary. They are posed making simple symbolic gestures like "look" and "listen," in a style that reminds me of character designs by manga artist Taiyo Matsumoto. Their bodies unite a range of ages, from smooth baby fat to fully developed breasts to intricately wrinkled hands. They gaze into infinity, mouths agape to reveal crooked porcelain teeth, and despite their uncanniness, they project an innocence that is relatable.

The show has no theme, and there are no restrictions on when a work has to have been created so long as it hasn’t been featured in a previous year’s "Commitment to Excellence." However, many of the works echo the kind of tension between reality and dream found in Shimazu’s sculptures. Many (but not all) works represent some aspect of Hawaii through a kind of surrealism.

Russell Sunabe’s large-scale "Wayfinder" is a dark and epic landscape that evokes an ecological collapse viewed from offshore, with the silhouette of Diamond Head on the horizon. Andrew Yamauchi’s "Pacific Heights" unites views of housing projects, parks, interior desktops and airport tarmacs, unified by a perspective of Honolulu from above Makiki.

On a more intimate scale, Jason Teraoka’s surreal painting "Snap" depicts a featureless cube of a burning building in the lower half of the canvas, and a graphic set of intersecting lines in the sky above.

Where Yamauchi in a sense "spoils the ending" by writing "lost but not forgotten" on his canvas, and Sunabe encourages the painting to simply menace the viewer, Teraoka opts for a more subtle symbolism of choke points, danger and alarm conveyed by the red squares that he uses to emphasize each intersection.

It’s not all about abstraction though. Elisa Chang’s untitled photograph of a Waikiki scene doesn’t use surrealism or collage-inspired techniques to get at the weirdness of everyday life here. The foreground is dominated by a bald, shirtless man whose back, upper arms and thighs are covered in what could be Japanese gangster tattoos. He is looking out of frame to the right, while a trio of tourists in the background are caught in one of those unconscious transitions we’ve all witnessed.

A woman is looking for something in her bag, using her thigh as support. Her female companion waits, while a male figure holds a huge bouquet of red, pink and white balloons. It’s a fleeting, ambiguous moment that nevertheless represents Hawaii, commerce and Japanese culture in a way that is a bit more ironic than the show’s founders might have intended.

Jurors Jay Jensen, Gregory E. Northrop and Yida Wang have come up with a strong show featuring 62 artists. The resulting cross-section of Hawaii artists represents a wide range of career trajectories and a good mix of known and unknown names.

Now that the Honolulu Museum of Art has shifted the format of "Artists of Hawaii" and put some long overdue focus on the role of art in education, "Commitment of Excellence" is among the last of the shows curated based on the open-call format.

And though the open call is always a bit of a free-for-all, it is ultimately a commitment to exploring the strengths that develop from openness and diversity.