The artwork was big. It was beautiful, and someone wanted to buy it, for $25,000. This person first, though, wanted to know from Deborah Nehmad what inspired her abstract “Wasted” imagery. When she explained that each of the roughly 10,000 holes burned into the piece — forming a circle in the center of a desolate landscape — represented a death of an American child, by gun, over a three-year span, the buyer’s interest quickly waned.

Such is the plight of the political artist, balancing the desire to share (and sell) work with the deep-rooted need to have it say something significant. Undaunted by such commercial setbacks, Nehmad has continued to develop artwork about gun violence in the United States. In her current exhibit, at the Koa Art Gallery of Kapiolani Community College, she experimented with colorful needlepoint (combined with quick-response codes for smartphones) and recruited three other artists/cultural critics to share their perspectives on other issues of concern. .

The show, called “Four,” continues through Feb. 4, with contributions also by painters Reem Bassous and Yida Wang and printmaker Pratisha Budhiraja. Collectively, Nehmad said the work comments upon social, political and cultural situations. Each artist starts the critique from a point of personal experience.

Bassous, for example, was born in Lebanon and spent most of her childhood in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Her uncle was killed on the last day of the war, in 1990, tragically surviving the horrors of the conflict for 15 years only to die from a stray bullet just hours before the intense fighting ended.

Since then, Bassous said, Lebanon has been entangled by a constant tension between Islamists and Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians. Bassous was doodling mazelike patterns in her notebook recently and started to think that they looked like Islamic Kufic script, a formal style of Islamic calligraphy, and also like a city grid. Reflecting upon her experiences in Beirut, those drawings, in turn, reminded her of that place and its predicament, with the political situation in Lebanon leading nowhere, she said, with no likely solutions, like a maze with no exit points. Those connections led to her contribution to this exhibit, dozens of mazelike drawings overlapped by Islamic or Coptic Christian symbols, using a highly toxic paint called micaceous iron oxide; insect pins hold the work to the wall.

“Even though I am not a Muslim,” Bassous said, “I find Islamic art absolutely beautiful. In light of the ways in which Muslims are being portrayed (in mass media), I felt responsible to show that beautiful side.”

She added, “Islamic art is sophisticated. The craftsmanship is really wonderful. Yet this paint makes me feel uneasy every time I use it. It is toxic while also being shimmery. Beirut is like that, always with a tension between beauty and danger.”

Nehmad said that artistic cultural criticism works best when it’s provocative but not pedantic, when it attracts viewers from afar and draws them into the conversation, and when the artwork stuns with its aesthetics as well as its meaning.

“I want my art to be seductive, and if people want to know what it’s about, they have to come in closer,” she said. “Some people get horrified (about rampant gun violence in the U.S.). The most gratifying point for me is when people are talking and thinking. If I lose a sale from that, so be it.”