When speaking of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's Department of Art and Art History BFA student work, the conversation takes an interesting turn.

Several questions must be asked, if not finally answered, thanks to provocative challenges recently issued by professor Donald Dugal in "Proclamation," a conceptual art piece on display in the February Art Faculty exhibition.

We are told that the exhibition's title, "First or Last," punningly alludes to the uncertain futures of the newly graduated art students. The students also planned all aspects of the production and installation of the exhibition.

The creative catalog for the show — credited to Marlon Alojepan, Josh Drechster, Nick Hunsinger and Tomi Ponciano — is placed on a wall as a work of art, quoting, in addition to artists' statements, the lofty words of Picasso ("Art is a lie that helps us realize the truth") and those of the celebrated Japanese potter Soetsu Yanagi ("Every artist knows that he is engaged in an encounter with Infinity, and that work done with heart and hand is ultimately worship of Life itself").

So, if I were to base this review on the challenges issued in Dugal's "Proclamation," the first indictment disguised as a question would be: Do the students spend too much time trying to be current with outside art trends?

From a quick look at the exhibition of recent work by 37 students in the media of painting, printmaking, fiber, glass, photography, graphic design, ceramics, sculpture and inter-media, an informed viewer can see the influence of established styles and trends.

Although hardly trailblazing, Mat Kubo's "12345" expresses a tough, industrial sensibility that is both fun as well as serious. On the outside of five hanging steel panels are attached small motors, their rotating arms striking the panels, metal on metal pings. Inside the enclosed space is a metal table-like structure, wires going up to the ceiling, two headphones hanging on hooks with knobs that control the volume of the amplified metallic pings.

Kubo creates a magical imaginary visual and auditory space, sometimes with echoes of raindrops falling on metal surfaces, sometimes with the mindless machine logic of a mechanical imperative, heedless of the human will. And finally, Kubo conjures an inescapable reference to a Rube Goldberg contraption, the inventions by the Pulitzer Prize- winning cartoonist, sculptor and author whose famous drawings depict absurdly connected machines functioning in extremely complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result.

Agitprop — traditionally defined as political propaganda, especially favoring communism and disseminated through literature, drama, art or music — has a long history, and art in the aid of political message has the same self-defined limitations as that of any single-focus art form, like pornography, for example. Joe Hunt's six-piece video "If it isn't on TV, it never really happened" is no exception.

Does mere eye candy dominate here over creative integrity, intellectual rigor and original visual research? Works by Joseph Wilson and MiRyeng Yang suggest that reasonable minds can differ as to the answer.

Wilson's ceramic "Latchkey" consists of several high on the wall-mounted Kewpie dolls — or are they really traditional Santo Niño or angelic Renaissance putti? — beautifully rendered in form, texture and color, floating on porcelain clouds above the eye level of the viewer. And yet, they also suggest layers of multiple art-historical allusions, wrapped in a title invoking the national shame of the approximately one out of every 10 children in grades 4 through 12 who is or has been a latchkey kid.

Yang's polyester "Obsession" appears to be pure eye candy, but who cares about labels when the oddly sensuous billowing forms seem to dance in front of the bamboo garden, seen through the gallery's window?

Or what about Jill Butterbaugh's attractive oils and charcoal on Masonite series, clearly delving into a rich mine of family memories? Or Daryle Fountain's skillful photo realism-inspired oils?

So much for the eye-candy indictment.

Do these artists resort to simple incongruous collage and borrowed photographic images and use of written word over dynamically complex compositions?

Certainly the wall-mounted photographic collages by Sara Berry ("Anatomy of a Memory") and Christopher Aradanas ("If you can't have it your way ...") exploit simple collages of personal, snapshot and digital photographic images.

Alicia Ajolo's "Floating Between," consisting of film, wood, fabric, vellum and florescent lights in a politically correct draped wooden box — apparently the current trend in display of naughty imagery — is essentially a collage piece in inspiration.

And several student artists do display works with words on the wall and highlighted in a book.

In the end, what the artist intends, as mediated by a careful attention given by the viewer, is what all art means. And what value it has, is always subjective.

And finally, are our local art critics guilty of indulging in superficial, talk-down and educate-the-ignorant artspeak?

Only you, the reader, can decide.