Once upon a time, seven dissidents banded together in protest against a society plagued by repression, corruption and war.

No, they weren’t the Chicago 7 or Secaucus 7, the Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai. They were a group of intellectuals in southern China back in the third century whose art and philosophy have influenced politics and culture throughout the ages since.

A mural-size scene of the friends relaxing in their outdoor salon — known as “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” — is the centerpiece of “Art in a Time of Chaos: Masterworks From Six Dynasties China, 3rd-6th Centuries,” which opens Thursday at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Organized by the Nanjing Museum in China and the China Institute Gallery in New York, the exhibition is premiering in Honolulu before moving to Manhattan in the fall.

“The seven sages were a countercultural movement known for their eccentric behavior,” said Shawn Eichmann, curator of Asian art at the Honolulu Museum of Art. “A lot of Beat poets looked back on this era for inspiration.

“They were also famous for their drinking parties,” he added with a smile.

The group of artists, musicians and philosophers retreated from society to the country estate of Ji Kang, a writer and disaffected court official. They espoused a quiet life in solitude with a few friends, but they didn’t keep quiet: While pursuing a return to nature and spiritual values (and lots of partying), they also challenged and abandoned social and political norms.

Ji ended up being executed by the imperial regent for flaunting the mores of the time.

The black-and-white lines of “Seven Sages” look painted or drawn but are actually a rubbing taken from bricks that had been stamped with sections of the design and then assembled into 10-by-12-foot walls. One thing that’s unique about this exhibit, Eichmann said, is that not only the rubbing, but whole sections of the fragile walls themselves on loan from the Nanjing Museum will be on view.

The Six Dynasties period, often referred to as the dark ages of China, saw “the longest period of political fragmentation in all of Chinese history,” Eichmann said. After 300 years of foreign invasion and civil war, followed centuries later by widespread destruction during the Taiping Rebellion and World War II, very little original artwork from 220 to 589 survives, particularly in the south. “Anything above ground was lost,” he said.

Most of the recovered artwork from the period comes from tombs unearthed since 1949, when the Chinese government began conducting archaeological digs. “Art in a Time of Chaos” contains approximately 115 recent archaeological finds from China’s Shanxi Provincial, Nanjing Municipal and Nanjing museums.

Today, as China moves forward with urbanization and industrialization on an unprecedented scale, it also finds itself looking back, Eichmann said, as building projects unearth new discoveries.

The Six Dynasties was also an age of burgeoning cultural diversity as the Chinese intermingled with foreigners for the first time. Invaders from India, Persia and Central Asia introduced new religions, notably Buddhism, as well as Christianity, Manichaeanism and Zoroastrianism, the latter two having roots in ancient Iran.

“This is the first major international exhibition that gives the whole picture of Chinese culture at the time, from foreign influences to a turning inward and reinventing of traditional Chinese culture, creating a new society on the ashes of the old,” Eichmann said.

AFTER its Honolulu run ends Aug. 21, “Art in a Time of Chaos” will travel on to inaugurate the China Institute’s new art gallery in downtown Manhattan, where it was originally planned to debut; Honolulu won the honor due to construction delays.

“The show will be our grand opening in late September,” said Willow Weilan Hai, China Institute gallery director and a curator of the exhibit, speaking by phone from her office in New York. The institute is a private nonprofit founded in 1926 by a group of Chinese and American educators.

Hai, who was raised in Nanjing and has directed the China Institute Gallery since 2000, said she chose the Six Dynasties period to usher in the new space because works from that time, rarely seen in the West, are animated with life and a spirit of change. In addition, she said, the exhibition is one of the first ever to compare the ceramics, sculpture, calligraphy and painting of China’s two dominant political centers at the time: Shanxi in the north and Nanjing in the south.

After the Han dynasty, which had unified China, collapsed in A.D. 220, the Six Dynasties began with the Three Kingdom period in which “three warlords in the south, north and west tried to rule the country,” Hai said. A subsequent brief period of unification by the western Ching dynasty lasted less than 100 years, interrupted by five different invasions. Because the north was in a state of invasion and violence, the Han and Ching officials fled to the south.

All this instability saw the rise of individualism and a surge in creativity, Hai said. As with the Dark Ages in Europe, the Six Dynasties era led to a renaissance in Chinese culture and art.

Sculpture became recognized as a fine art apart from tomb figures, calligraphy and painting emerged as separate art forms and, for the first time, painters were recognized by name as individual artists, according to Eichmann and Hai.

Also for the first time, individuals and their secular daily lives emerged as artistic subjects in paintings and sculpture, Hai said.

“Before, the art may have served the court or some propaganda or moral reason — it was more educational,” she said. “But in this period, in the chaos, people are really looking at what is true value for their life.”

Case in point: A gorgeous red-and-green frieze, painted in a style reminiscent of Persian miniatures, shows scenes of fashionable people entertaining at home and fleet warriors on horseback hunting deer.

“This Yu Hong tomb panel is showing the northern people’s lives and even the foreigners’ lives,” Hai said, referring to the nomadic peoples, known as barbarians in their time, who swept across the north. “There are panels showing them enjoying life — hunting, playing music. This is the master’s life while he is alive, so he brings that to his next life.”

With their lively, dense depictions of humans, birds, flora and fantastic beasts, the carved and painted stones and ceramics prefigure the medieval European tapestries and illuminated manuscripts that came 1,000 years later and look stilted by comparison today.

The warlike culture of the north is represented in a collection of military drummers on horseback. Other works in the show, Eichmann said, demonstrate how the introduction and adoption of Buddhist sculpture, depicting realistic, nude human anatomy, further evolved into a uniquely Chinese expression and style. A serene, smiling female Bodhisattva head is a particular treasure, he noted.

The exhibit also charms with modest items such as a sculpture of a nimble-fingered zither player, his mouth small with concentration, and a small beige pottery dog, its back engraved with calligraphy shown in a rubbing displayed alongside. “That calligraphy says, ‘This dog’s name is Black Dragon,’” Hai said with a laugh. “That shows a sense of humor.”

IN THE southern kingdom, while also celebrating music and the pleasures of life, artists and writers exercised more intellectual rigor and searching.

“In the south you also have the music, the outings, but the main figure is really more intellectual, philosophical, talking with a more aloof kind of feeling, looking for some higher realm to entrust their ideal kind of world,” Hai said.

“The intellectuals were fond of our ancient philosophy of Laozi (author of the ‘Tao Te Ching’) and Zhuangzi (his top student), which goes back as far as the fifth century B.C., looking more into nature and spiritual freedom.”

With all these philosophers needing their thoughts recorded, the art of calligraphy blossomed. “So many great calligraphers were being produced, the only (such) period in our history,” Hai said.

Yet, ironically, no original calligraphy by those masters, such as Wang Xixhi, has survived from this period — or at least, according to Eichmann, nothing that can be confirmed as such.

It was a time of great uncertainty, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the picture of the seven sages. Smiling, conversing, playing music, their refined faces drawn in lyrical, expressive lines, they sit in flowing robes on the grass beneath the trees. Their names survive and are noted on an accompanying calligraphic rubbing.

There is Ruanji, the famous poet and musician, and Liuling, the famous drunk. There is Ji Kang, who was also Ruanji’s best friend and lover, playing his lute, which he is said to have done while awaiting execution.

Talk about grace under pressure. This rich and entrancing exhibit, filled with works of illumination and enduring legend made during a dark age, holds meaning for contemporary social critics as well as sheer delight for lovers of art.