"HI Society" is the fourth show in a series that educational curator Aaron Padilla has developed as a means of supporting the teaching of math, science, literature and, now, social studies.

Eschewing the museum’s permanent collection, Padilla worked closely with artists Brenda Cablayan, April A. H. Drexel, Cheyne Gallarde, Lopaka Kapanui, Brandon Ng, Shuzo Uemoto and Edwin Ushiro to address questions of "Who lives here?" "What are you?" and "How you gonna act?"

The viewer is invited to follow a conceptual theme that begins with Cablayan’s Makiki paintings, passes through Drexel’s intensely metaphoric installation, zigzags among Gallarde’s life-size representations, cruises through Uemoto’s deceptively simple portraits, and dissolves in Ng’s interactive space. The work of Kapanui and Ushiro, though conceptually aligned with the show, suffers from sequestration in the cavernous space of Spalding House’s downstairs gallery.

Nevertheless, their joint exploration of peoples’ tales of the "faceless lady" ghost establishes a baseline for contemplating the questions of who we are, and to what degree our existence is valued. Starting with the idea that we are all ghosts in today’s society, attention can be returned to the material conditions of living here.

Cablayan and Drexel both represent Makiki as it was and as it is, traveling from mountaintop to flatland. Cablayan’s paintings include poolside vistas of Honolulu’s cranes and condos viewed from Tantalus, and the concrete world beneath the H-1 freeway. Her impressionist style and keen eye for light is highly accessible and reflects the viewer’s familiarity with the local developed landscape.

Drexel excavates this foundation, tracing the historical process that morphed stewardship into ownership in Makiki. Instead of constructing a straightforward (and dry) history, Drexel has translated more than two years of research into an assemblage of drying boxes, symbolic fish images, map and real estate records. Hers is a spatial arrangement of information, expressed through gestures of suspension, cutting, stacking, labeling, categorizing and layering.

Unlike Gallarde’s chameleonlike self-portraits, Drexler’s installation resists decoding, as her medium is that of metaphors that are often better understood in terms of Hawaiian language and concepts. In contrast, Gallarde creates a pantheon of local archetypes that he embodies through costuming and makeup. Printed on life-size foam cutouts, the tourist, aunty, veteran, downtown businessman, construction worker and others operate as ritual figures.

The works of Cablayan, Drexel and Gallarde should be taken as one complex idea machine, where the cut-out people are the symbolic occupants of the residences portrayed in the paintings. Between architecture and population is the hidden history of traditional Hawaiian place names and land use that reminds us of how much Hawaiian culture is taken for granted because of its erasure.

But the viewer is not left with this sometimes painful challenge of wrestling with modernity in Hawaii. Gallarde’s contemporary archetypes play against Shuzo Uemoto’s portraits of kumu hula, ushering the viewer from what could be a prop warehouse for TV or film through a traditional gallery presentation of photography.

Uemoto’s subjects represented themselves in whatever way they felt most comfortable, and the results are diverse. Some kumu sit in traditional garb with the tools of their art, while others would disappear in any aloha Friday crowd. It’s the in-between moments, where humility meets cultural wealth and authority (witness Eleanor Hiram Hoke!) that encourage a fresh contemplation of then and now, self and other.

Brandon Ng’s in-progress installation might democratize this process, bridging cheeky Gallarde’s characters and Uemoto’s formality. His space will fill with professional black-and-white portraits of everyday local people, printed on transparencies in hanging grids that will evoke the oft-touted "melting pot" of Hawaii.

However these faces will blend into a semi-legible mass is akin to the anonymous solidarity of a traffic jam: a widely shared social reality that invites a departure from the observational humor of Frank De Lima and our morning radio personalities.

"HI Society" presents puzzles of social history, camouflaged geographies, crime scenes, fragments of ambivalence and cliche — and ghost stories. Though each artist certainly has a position that he or she occupies, what they have produced together is one of the more genuine and authentic representations of the challenges and opportunities of Hawaii’s everyday diversity.