Included are a veritable who's who of Hawai'i artists, including Les Biller, Allyn Bromley, Lee Chesney, Russell Davidson, Byron Goto, Sueko Kimura, John Kjargaard, Alan Leitner, Alison Manaut, Rick Mills, Mary M. Mitsuda, Hiroki Morinoue, Timothy P. Ojile, Laila Twigg-Smith and John Young, among many others.

Ben Norris' "Sun Space," for example, speaks of a protean imagination, grounded in classic watercolor sensibility, grappling with a new syntax and methods of materials and techniques, abstract expressionism disciplined by hard-edge minimalism.

Subtly cool, minimalist works by Ken Bushnell and the late Helen Gilbert practically reach across the room to embrace each other in complementary communion.

The exhibition illuminates without being dryly didactic.

Detail of "Dragonland," Betty Tseng Yuho Ecke's dsui hua ("assembled art") with gold leaf and lacquer on Masonite, 1964 David Farmer • Special to the Honolulu Advertiser

Modern European artists like surrealists Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, neo-plasticist painter Piet Mondrian and teacher/artist Hans Hofmann were all drawn to New York City, the new center of the art world, effectively replacing Paris.

These artists in turn influenced Americans like Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko to develop a freer and more personal means of expression, freed from the bounds of realism.

Action painting, or abstract expressionism as this post-World War II art movement was dubbed in 1946, was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence.

After the war, soldiers returned from Europe and the Pacific, the GI Bill allowing more of them than ever before to get college educations. Veterans of the 100th Battalion, 442nd Infantry were no exception.

Hawai'i artists were deeply influenced by these American and European trends.

Many — such as Satoru Abe, Isami Doi, Tetsuo Ochikubo, Jerry Okimoto, Tadashi Sato, Harry Tsuchidana and Reuben Tam — lived and worked in New York from the 1930s through the 1960s. Their works are shown to fine advantage in the exhibition.

These local artists later returned to Hawai'i, bringing with them the language of abstraction.

Meanwhile, back in the Islands, the University of Hawai'i Art Department, under the leadership of Ben Norris, brought a large number of visiting European artists to the university, including such important artists as French surrealist painter Max Ernst, his wife Dorothea Tanning, and German artist and Bauhaus teacher Joseph Albers.

Some, like Jean Charlot, thankfully stayed after arriving in 1949.

By the 1960s, abstract expressionism had lost most of its impact and was no longer as influential as it had been. Direct responses to and rebellions against abstract expressionism, such as minimalism — objects stripped down to their elemental, geometric form as in the works of Tony Smith (also a visiting artist at UH in 1969), Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly and the early Frank Stella — also were embraced by Hawai'i artists.

Jim Rosen's minimalist "Maybe Blue" provoked one of the first local cause célébre about state-supported public art.

Pop art — a term that first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and that referred to artists' interests in mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products images — found expression in the works of American artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud.

Many painters, some of whose works can be seen here, continued to work in abstract expressionist style for many years afterwards, extending and expanding its visual and philosophical implications.

When the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts was established in 1966 as the state arts agency to receive federal money from the newly created National Endowment for the Arts, one of the goals of architect Alfred Preis in creating the visionary and trail-blazing Art in State Buildings Program — in addition to bringing aesthetic enhancement to public buildings as a virtual museum without walls — was to stimulate art awareness and the creation of a viable market that would enable Hawai'i's exiled artists to return home.

With the opening of the state art museum two years ago, the final piece of Preis' vision finally was realized.

The former YMCA, built in 1928 in the Spanish-Mission style, is now home to Hawai'i's second-largest art gallery, with 12,000 square feet of extremely well designed gallery space on its second floor.

The new exhibition effectively complements the impressive inaugural exhibition, "Enriched by Diversity: The Art of Hawai'i," consisting of 360 works in the state art collection created by 284 artists, most dating from the 1960s to the present.

Divided into sections labeled "Hawaiian Heritage," "Asian Roots," Social Consciousness" and "Traditions and Values," the semi-permanent exhibition educates without preaching.

The exhibition honors all these artists' contributions to the rich and vital diversity we know as the art of Hawai'i with works both representative as well as astonishing, reminiscent of Cocteau's celebrated "Amaze me!," as he is said to have challenged a young admirer.

Uniquely in Hawai'i, Asian and Western aesthetics and artistic traditions have been engaged in creative dialogue and synthesis, fostered by its geographic location, and indigenous and multicultural populations.

This fusion is best seen in Betty Tseng Yuho Ecke's works.

She learned traditional calligraphy in her youth in Beijing, where she also studied Western art history with Gustav Ecke, the renowned German art historian and scholar, who became her husband. With the Communist Revolution in 1949, they were forced to leave China and came to Hawai'i, where they both ultimately served as distinguished professors of art and art history at UH.

She is well known for her dsui hua ("assembled painting"), a technique similar to collage, in which paper is cut or torn into shapes and arranged in layers.

In dsui paintings, tissue-thin handmade papers are applied in layers, with some painting and often gold leaf applications supplying the finishing touches.

Derived from traditional Chinese painting, Tseng's landscape forms and calligraphic strokes are transmuted into striking abstract images inspired by abstract expressionism.

An early dsui painting in the exhibition is the 1964 "Dragonland," in which a deep Chinese red background, weathered with expressionist gestures, is enhanced by gold-leaf squares, summoning forth the spectre of some mythic dragon artifact taken from the Forbidden City.

Other highlights include a classic Charlot image of a Hawaiian drummer, at once strikingly masculine in boldness of line, at the same time delicately sensitive in it subtle, soft kiss of complementary colors.

By contrast, Fred Roster's wonderfully designed and deceptively whimsical sculptures offer a playful yet extremely sensitive tactile experience that gives the viewer a smile with a soft caress, an exhibition design strategy akin to that of the great dramatists who understood that even tragedy must be relieved by light and laughter.

"Stepping Wind" — his 1972 wood, serpentine, and cast and fabricated bronze sculpture — whispers of "humanity carried along in an unconscious way by the grace of nature."

Willson Stamper's magnificent 1975 oil-on-linen painting of Mauna Kea in the "Inspired by the Land Sea" section of the exhibition is expressive not only of that phenomenal natural wonder, but also of a uniquely Hilo experience of living in its perennial shadow.

In all three galleries of the museum — with their elegantly designed modular walls, light units that warm and invite and illuminate, the richly finished floors and the pervasive ambience of a proud old building that still houses the presence of spirits of the past — one experiences a particularly Hawaiian sense of place and resonance that serves the works with grace and highest honors.