Given that a Chinese scroll is read from right to left, it makes sense to take in “Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe” at the Honolulu Museum of Art counterclockwise.

It’s up to the viewer, of course.

“Whatever you get from it is your own,” said Beijing-born artist Ji in a phone interview from Columbus, Ohio, where he lives. “There’s no right or wrong. It’s very much your own.”

Ji uses ink and watercolor on paper mounted on silk to create traditional Chinese hand scrolls, a thousand-years-old practice. But rather than idyllic landscapes, he presents scenes of displacement, chaos and the destruction of nature.

The “Three Gorges Dam Migration, Fall 2009” — printed with more than 500 hand-carved, pear wood blocks — depicts in colorful detail the emotions of upheaval due to the construction of the largest hydropower plant in the world, which displaced some 1.2 million people and flooded entire towns. With their belongings gathered in baskets, families cluster, seemingly lost, faces furled in expressions of loss and consternation.

Ji, 52, witnessed the displacement firsthand during visits to China.

Another scroll, “The Village and Its Ghosts” (2014), is an unfolding narrative measuring more than 60 feet long. It wraps around a wall and starts with bucolic scenes of life among mountain trees. Midway, villagers are uprooted, their belongings and animals windblown and turned upside-down, spiraling into a grotesque underworld of skeletons and monsterlike creatures inspired, in part, by the ghost stories Ji heard from his grandmother while growing up.

“I feel like they’re saying more about the human condition than anything else,” said Ji.