Indonesia-born Cheng was educated in Dutch schools and privately tutored in a variety of media before coming to Honolulu in 1967.

From 1970 to the early 1980s, she gained a reputation for her work primarily in batik, and later turned to paper and collage.

Cheng's acrylic paintings and large-scale pastel drawings feature Polynesian women, relaxed and lounging, swaddled in fabric graced with patterns inspired by Hawaiian kapa (tapa) cloth and the Tahitian pareo.

This terrain is extremely tricky, having been well mined by such artists as Gauguin, Juliette May Fraser, Madge Tennant, Jean Charlot, Pegge Hopper and Susan Hansen to the point of cliché.

Cheng's paintings are really about the fabric designs, which dominate the full-bodied Polynesian female figures with vacant, undistinguished faces.

Her oversized black pastels on paper pieces are less successful. Hovering somewhere between a linear and painterly medium, pastel can be fiendishly difficult to handle.

These pieces appear forced and thin, somehow undercooked, with no strength of gesture or precision of line to make them interesting.

Margaret Ezekiel

Margaret Ezekiel's "25 mph," pastel on paper, is an example of the Kaua'i artist's signature large-scale sky and cloudscape pieces. The work is part of a series of panels called "Procession," which is on display at the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center. Robert Herold photo

This exhibition highlights Ezekiel's recent return to the figure in a series of seven large achromatic pastel panels collectively titled "Procession."

Starting with figures reminiscent of the classic image of the banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden, these panels, with their skillfully rendered, mostly nude figures, glow from within, suggesting a kind of reconciliation, the promise of a universe in love and at peace with itself, an ultimate integration of body and spirit.

In her "Time ... No Time" series, consisting of Kaua'i rice-planting landscapes, she demonstrates a similar technical facility and expressive use of the unique attributes of the pastel medium.

But it is in her glorious small- and large-scale sky and cloudscapes that she truly soars and transcends a tendency toward tightness sometimes evident in her other work. In "25 mph," "In Deep Blue," "Last Light," "Here and Forever" and especially her "Harbor" series of 2000, we experience with delight an artist's love affair with the ephemeral that intones the eternal.

Robert Hamada

Robert Hamada's "L-6," 1995, is made from Norfolk Island pine. Robert Herold photo

Hamada loves Hawaiian woods. It shows in the kou piece "F-2." Robert Herold photo

Working in Hawaiian woods such as kou, kauila, hau and his favorite, milo, he creates works of elegant simplicity, famous for their sensitive wood grain textures and smooth polished surfaces.

On view are various wood forms created on a lathe, from symmetrical calabashes to free-form sculptural pieces which retain rotted or termite-eaten areas to exploit defects in the wood.

Also on view is a sample of his stitched pieces such as the 1986 "A-13," a large camphorwood pot.

After harvesting and aging his raw materials, he begins carving on the lathe, working on several bowls at a time. "The wood talks to me," he says, "and tells me what it wants to be."

He then sands the pieces by hand, a process sometimes taking hundreds of hours, sometimes resulting in translucent, paper-thin pieces.

Finally, he burnishes the surfaces with leather, tissue paper, paper towel or leaf coverings from breadfruit trees to create rich lusters.

The exquisite balance between the consummate hand craftsmanship and the deeply respectful honor accorded the woods' natural shapes marks Hamada's works as those of a living treasure and an authentic master.