Utagawa Hiroshige’s “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” his series of 19th-century woodblock prints celebrating the city that became Tokyo, is famous because it is awesome, and awesome because it is famous. But “Hiroshige’s City: From Edo to Tokyo,” at the Honolulu Museum of Art, is based on more than the strength of the artist’s brand. The show is a rather clever curatorial move that maps Hiroshige’s survey against the region’s natural and urban histories, thereby creating new contexts for appreciating his landscapes and scenes of bustling city life.

The art historical value of the “hundred views” is unquestionable, and the opportunity to see them in person is a privilege we too often overlook. In “Hiroshige’s City,” however, the series also provides a solid foundation for absorbing the work of contemporary artists Yoshimura Ayako and Motoda Hisaharu.

Both Ayako and Hisaharu extend Hiroshige’s fundamental reference to “meisho” (famous places) into much more critical territory. Still, their projects connect back to the earlier practice in which various points of cultural significance are unified through the frame of the landscape.

Hisaharu’s lithograph/ink works align with every science fiction, post-apocalyptic rendition of a “mega-Tokyo” seen in both manga and anime – particularly in the urban-scapes of Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira.” However, Hisaharu’s Tokyo is depopulated and crumbling, with its most famous districts from Akihabara to Ginza to Shibuya being reclaimed by the marshes and vegetation that once defined the landscape.

At first the impact of Hisaharu’s work seems weakened by a different kind of “famous scene” that comes from the cinematic science fiction tradition he is engaging. Examples include the reclamation of Washington, D.C., by kudzu and swampland in “Logan’s Run,” the half-buried Statue of Liberty from “Planet of the Apes” and the ruins of New York in “I Am Legend.”

Though he plays with the cinematic fetishization of destroyed global landmarks, Hisaharu’s point here is not the shock of recognition that photorealistic visual effects give us. Rather, it is the emotional impact of the human hand that draws the viewer in with a balance of atmospheric haze, architectural precision and images of Winnie the Pooh, a suit of armor, or the logos of Samsung and SEGA fading or peeling away from the buildings’ facades.

A comparison between Hisaharu’s abandoned streets and a scene like Hiroshige’s “Night View of Saruwaka-machi” might seem radical. But Hiroshige’s deep, one-point perspective, featuring the painted and backlit signs of businesses, has a lonely quality to it – though the street is populated, the people can be seen as ghosts … which today, of course, they are.

Ayako’s “Places — a City” is a 15-minute video that seems to be shot from a rotating restaurant. At first glance the landscape beyond could be just about any major metropolis on the planet: Skyscrapers rise alongside lower stacks of buildings, surround parks and stand guard over rivers. Then one notices the blocks of color where billboards used to be, and a creeping sense of the familiar begins to pull the viewer into the recognition game. Is that New York? Dubai? Hong Kong? London? Now things get weird: Harbors are landlocked, deserts bristling with cranes give way to classical domes, minarets, rooftop tennis courts and freeways that go nowhere. The perspective lines of the roads are gently mismatched, and there is an odd distortion as Ayako pushes and pulls the focus while the panorama rolls past.

“Places” turns out to be a digital quilt of many cities, edited to exclude any famous landmarks. In this, Ayako echoes one of the earliest composite views of Edo, an 18th-century print by Utagawa Toyoharu called “The Eight Views of Omi” which inspired Hiroshige. Ayako has generalized Toyoharu’s view, showing us what the planet’s investment bankers and real estate developers might envision: one big planet-spanning city, devoid of people and ripe with opportunity.

This should bring us home, as we contemplate Kakaako construction sites decorated with glossy images of Hawaiian royalty, natural landscapes and modern lifestyles. We know that before the hotels, and within living memory, Waikiki was dedicated to rice and taro, and existed as natural wetlands before that. This is Hiroshige’s true legacy, inviting us to align the labor of tour guides and fieldworkers with the riverside potters of Gyotaku and the dyers of Kanada. Ayako and Hisaharu point us past boondoggles and condo towers, perhaps reminding us of what we might have to lose.