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While it showcases a private collector’s vast array of vintage, Hawaii-themed commercial art spanning nearly 100 years, Bishop Museum’s provocative new exhibit, “Unreal: Hawai‘i in Popular Imagination,” is also a study in contrasts. Read more

While it showcases a private collector’s vast array of vintage, Hawaii-themed commercial art spanning nearly 100 years, Bishop Museum’s provocative new exhibit, “Unreal: Hawai‘i in Popular Imagination,” is also a study in contrasts.

The show juxtaposes two perspectives — those of Native Hawaiians and outsiders — in the museum’s Long Gallery, which has been divided down the middle by the outline of the natural Waikiki shoreline in 1850, before its contours were dramatically altered by development.

The outsider vision occupies a carpet of green artificial turf, part of the exhibit, which is installed in the back half of the gallery. The walls of this back space are completely papered with full-size reproductions of the collection’s bright, colorful printed advertisements for the visitor industry cliche of Hawaii, with the usual alluring hula dancers, beach boys, palm trees and gentle Waikiki waves.

“UNREAL: HAWAI‘I IN POPULAR IMAGINATION” AND HAWAIIAN HALL” >> Where: Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice St.

>> When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, closed Thanksgiving and Christmas, through Jan. 27

>> Cost: General admission $24.95, military and Hawaii residents $14.95; see website for senior, student and youth discounts.

>> Info: bishopmuseum.org “STATE OF ART: NEW WORK” >> Where: Hawai‘i State Art Museum, 250 S. Hotel St.

>> When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Sept. 2019

>> Cost: Free

>> Info: sfca.hawaii.gov

“These images are beautiful, but also they’re signs of trauma and cultural misappropriation.” said exhibit curator Scott Lawrimore, noting the 180-odd prints belie the history of dispossession of Native Hawaiians, who are portrayed exclusively as servers and entertainers of visitors. In an art deco tableau, a Hawaiian paddles a canoe laden with food, with a whole pig placed in the prow next to a kii, a carved wooden image of a god being used as a prop for a tourist luau.

But these western images, however traumatic, are familiar, and what makes “Unreal” new is the museum’s addition of an indigenous vision: A mural painted in 2016 in a collaborative effort by six Native Hawaiian artists. A two-sided, 6-by-20-foot work, “Ku‘u ‘Aina Aloha,” by Al Lagunero, Meleanna Meyer, Harinani Orme, Kahi Ching, Carl F.K. Pao and Solomon Enos, hangs in space, letting visitors walk around and view both sides.

It’s a rare opportunity to see this mural, which is part of a traveling documentary film project exploring how indigenous people worldwide can confront and heal from the harms suffered through conquest by outsiders. One side is abstract: raw, red and violent; the other realistic, a peaceful green landscape with waterfalls, loi, kupuna and a child.

In another indigenous touch, the gallery’s ocean-blue walls are printed with Hawaiian phrases intended to prompt reflection, such as: Pehea oe iho? (How are you, really?); He aha ka waiwai a ka Hawaii? (What is the value of Hawaii and Hawaiian people/culture?) and Na wai ke kama o oe? (Whose child are you?).

“Tourists may think ‘ ‘Aina Aloha’ is the unreal Hawaii, because the other is what they’re familiar with,” said Meyer, who is an arts educator and filmmaker as well as a painter.

Kapalikuokalani Maile, a museum cultural educator, emphasized there are multiple meanings to the phrases. The exhibitors’ hope is that the trauma of westernization in Hawaii, and the artists’ vision for the future, shown in “ ‘Aina Aloha” will help viewers better understand the effects of the unreal messages that attracted visitors to the islands.

“This was the social media of its time,” Maile said of the commercial art in the collection. One question the exhibit raises, he said, is “Where do we go from here when representing a place and people as artists?”

POSSIBLE ANSWERS — and more questions — can be explored in a contemporaneous exhibit, “State of Art: new work,” at the Hawai‘i State Art Museum (HiSAM), which presents recent acquisitions of work by Hawaii artists for the Art in Public Places Collection of the State Foundation for Culture and the Arts. A centerpiece of this show is a massive openwork skirt woven of coconut rope by Marques Hanalei Marzan, who makes contemporary artwork using traditional materials and methods.

His inspiration, Marzan said in a presentation at HiSAM on Aug. 28, was the nets traditionally used by Native Hawaiians to carry and protect wood calabashes belonging to the alii. “Today, with the change in the whole social system, the form gains modern relevance as protecting something held dear by people of any class,” Marzan said.

In a contemporary context, “The human body becomes the vessel the net/skirt protects,” he said. “And its function is also keeping an art form alive.” In a similar vein, he riffed on a traditional fan used by alii to challenge one another before battles, opening it up into a more abstract, contemporary expression of the power and elegance an object can provide its bearer. For his talk, Marzan showed slides and brought in some pieces for the audience to touch; the fan, though, is in the British Museum in London, which had commissioned it to show alongside traditional Native Hawaiian objects as an example of how ancient forms could be updated.

It was Marzan who suggested the inclusion of “‘Aina Aloha” in “Unreal” at the Bishop Museum, where he also works as a cultural adviser. His reason: “The whole premise of ‘Unreal Hawai‘i’ was the outside looking in, and I thought, why not the view from the inside looking out?”

The view from the inside out can be liberating, as illustrated by Marzan’s veil, woven from natural fibers, based on a traditional fish trap. Made to hang over a woman’s face, the veil “can hide and keep things out, but also provides “the opportunity to be yourself without being afraid of how you’re going to be perceived by others,” Marzan said during his talk. The fish trap motif also informs Marzan’s “Self Portrait,” made of multiple materials that, he said, bring together his multiple genealogies: Japanese, Filipino and Native Hawaiian. (The veil and self-portrait are not part of the “State of Art” exhibit, which includes only the skirt.)

The HiSAM show, which must be seen, features works by artists of Native Hawaiian and other ethnicities, in a wide range of media and styles. Artworks by Lori Uyehara, Charlton Kupa‘a Hee, Tom Lieber, Yoonmi Nam, Nisha Pinjani, Masami Teraoka, Lori Uyehara, David Valdez and many others make beautiful, witty and powerful statements about the islands’ fragile environment and fraught, post-western culture.

BECAUSE HAWAII’S pre-western culture also underlies and informs both shows, this is an opportune time for viewers of “Unreal” and “State of Art” to visit, or revisit, Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Hall, adjacent to its Long Gallery. The hall is dominated by the Grand Ku and other kii heiau, imposing wooden temple statues with fierce, elemental expressions and warrior stances; their very real and powerful presences banish the cartoonish, trivial depictions of “tiki” in “Unreal.” They and the other objects in Hawaiian Hall, including the grass house, the feather cloaks and helmets and the images of mo‘o water lizards in stone, are filled with substance and meaning, connecting to the viewer across time, culture and language. They are the opposite of the sentimental, ephemeral commercial art on the walls and in the display cases next door.

One effect that all these exhibits share: They make us look inward as well as outward, admitting our own blind spots and moving forward. They contribute to a self-understanding, sense of relief and homecoming akin to diving into the Hawaiian sea.