Sandwiched between designer stores on Luxury Row on Kalakaua Ave, in a recently vacated Hugo Boss store, you can find an offering altogether different: art and food for thought. The Honolulu Biennial kicks off an innovative series of pop-up exhibitions with “Flooded,” a multidisciplinary installation that uses food as a lens to think about coping with climate change.

“Flooded” is the first installment of a collaboration between four New York-based artists with a special focus in food and prop styling and photography, on view through April 30.

The world of “Flooded” offers historical maps as evidence of climate change, and visions of a present and future world where flooding demands that we re-evaluate the way we eat in order to survive. Large-scale photographs of gorgeous, carefully deconstructed food up to four feet long dominate the white walls. Additional elements, like otherworldly jars of pickled seaweed and pressed Hawaiian limu, bring the show into three dimensions.

“We wanted to connect huge phenomena with the way we eat,” said artist and food researcher Allie Wist, who is also an art director for Saveur Magazine.

Even more tangibly, “we wanted to show that we can eat like this as a people,” says collaborator Heami Lee, the exhibit lighting designer and photographer. Along with Wist and Lee, Rebecca Bartoshesky contributed work as a prop stylist, and CC Buckley provided expertise as an herbalist and food stylist. “Flooded” is the first of a two-part collaboration for the foursome, to be followed by an exhibit investigating the effects of drought.

“Flooded” is as impeccably styled as the artists’ food magazine pedigree would demand. Some of the photos are tinted with an otherworldly blue light, with patterns of light playing on the objects, as if we were looking at table settings from the shipwrecked Titanic. Elixirs are half drunk in colored glass. Forks glint with iridescence. The modern preparations include ingredients such as sunchoke chips with burdock, and dandelion root hummus. The flooded future, it seems, is perfectly, suggestively, undressed.

In my favorite moments, it’s unclear whether the photographs represent food floating in the rising tides or meals prepared especially to eat. Vessels are filled with floating clams and broth that could be seawater itself. Barnacles grow on the outside of clams; seaweed and kale commingle on a plate as if they grew there. Oyster shells glisten among a tangle of chickweed on ice, and on these tables, land and sea vegetables become one.

At other points in the show, the focus on composition can be a distraction from the themes at hand. The photographs can feel so studied that they feel like less like a vision of salvaged food in a dystopian future and more like a magazine spread predicting the next hot trend. However, I remind myself that in these times more than ever, people consume what is trendy, hip and beautiful. There is a role for beautifying, even fetishizing, foraged and wild foods.

The show culminates in a strikingly incongruent photo, perhaps the most beautiful. It has a round rock sitting within a round plate, and its title reads, “Method of desalinating water.” But how do you desalinate water? I wonder. A million accusing questions emerge for me about if and how we’ll gather the knowledge we need to face water and food shortages in the face of climate change. In her artist’s talk and in accompanying text materials, Wist explains how to use two bowls, a rock, saran wrap and sunlight to transform seawater into potable water.

Standing alone in the gallery, the photo of the rock and the bowl appear almost as stark as a Zen parable. It may be simple to live sustainably, but without the necessary skills and knowledge, we are left with only seawater and our thirst.

As a whole, the show is texturally ravishing, and visually cohesive. Land has blended into sea. The featured mushrooms, seaweeds and sea creatures — even the distressed and abstract industrial backgrounds — all share similar shapes, patterns of movement and color gradation. They are all elements of the same narrative, with no narrator.

In one photo, a dinner plate floats adrift in the New York East River — but what of the people who ate on it? There are echoes of our existence — the foundations of buildings, the pots and pans. However, humans are mysteriously, totally absent from the exhibit. Only the evidence of our appetites remains.