"Voyaging: The Art of Wayfinding" is a small but thoughtfully curated show in the Hawaii State Art Museum’s Turnaround Gallery. Paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs and textiles reflect, document and respond to the Polynesian arts of wayfinding (ocean navigation without instruments), and broader themes of perceiving the ocean itself.

Curator James Kuroda’s wide-ranging sample of works from the museum’s Art In Public Places collection explores the perceptual discipline that wayfinding requires: the reading of the ocean’s changes in color, texture and energy; the frequency, types and behaviors of sea animals; and a deep literacy of clouds, wind and rain. Nearly half of the gallery (literally, if not by historic gravitas) is appropriately dedicated to the work of legendary polymath Herb Kawainui Kane.

There is always power in the presence of original versions of paintings that have been widely reproduced. The famously epic "The Discovery of Hawaii" is on display in its full-sized glory, but the smaller paintings are the real stars that guide. Each is a portrait of a different type of Polynesian voyaging canoe, rendered with almost encyclopedic density that is balanced by a profound clarity and accessibility.

In a work like "Archaic Form of Voyaging Vessel," we see Kane’s exemplary commitment to historic, technical and cultural accuracy on display. But his choice to portray the hard work of paddling through doldrums is as emotional as it is informative.

Similarly, the nighttime setting of "Pahi from Tuamotu Archipelago," its intimidating swells and rendering of the crew and their small domestic fire represent the confidence of Polynesian navigators, but also evoke the loneliness they must have confronted.

Other works in "Voyaging" that are not formally linked to wayfinding nevertheless serve as entry points that simulate the optics and sensitivities of Polynesian seafaring. Reuben Tam’s abstract seascapes capture aspects of the ocean with great accuracy. "October Gale" represents the seasonally specific character of sky, cloud, spray and breaking waves driven by powerful winds, witnessed from the shore. It is not difficult to imagine Polynesian navigators recognizing this moment in Tam’s painting, not for its photorealism but for its spirituality.

Similarly, Elizabeth Train’s "Turquoise Tides" might be too "representational" in a Polynesian maritime context, but the depth of visual knowledge that she translates into this woven and felted surface echoes the materials, textures and colors of the ocean. A traditional seafarer trained to read depth and current in terms of light interacting with the sea’s surface would recognize Train’s expression.

A navigator would also find points of intersection between tradition and the artistic composition of Wayne Levin’s "Approaching Sooty Terns." This large-format photograph features a flock of these seabirds, glorious in their streamlined adaptation to the rigors of long-distance flight. Taken while accompanying a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration trip to the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, the image gives us a sense of the acts of observation and pattern recognition being a kind of Polynesian technology.

If Kane is a visual archivist, then Jeera Rattanang­koon’s rainbow-spectrum woodcut "Earth and Sky" is like a storyboard for a film that is hundreds of years old and "shot" all over the Pacific Ocean. Divided into more than 80 horizontal panels, "Earth and Sky" is a mosaic of individually etched portraits of land, sea, sky and flora, each inked in one of 42 different colors. This piece in particular is a great example of the ways that contemporary artists can combine concrete knowledge with aesthetic means of delivery.

One cannot consider Polynesian voyaging without acknowledging the mastery of design that is required to make such journeys. Wright Bowman’s scale model of the Hokule‘a is a 3-D centerpiece for the show, representing a precision and rigor that is echoed in Kane’s amazing canoe schematics, and Laura Ruby’s mixed-media print that combines barbed wire, the slitted view from the inside of a Diamond Head bunker, and her own interpretive meditation on Polynesian navigational charts.

"Voyaging" creates a quietly radical relationship between nonindigenous artists’ general appreciation for Hawaii’s ecologies and long-established technical and aesthetic traditions that are rooted above all else in survival.

Given the frequency with which Polynesian — and Hawaiian, in particular —concepts are appropriated, this show offers the viewer a new way to see and respect our oceanic life that doesn’t displace the perspective of those who have been doing so for far longer.