Imagine a party where only your very best friends gather in pristine natural conditions beyond the chaos of the city. You are scattered in small groups on both banks of a garden stream that zig-zags past trees whose gnarled roots grip bare rock. You discuss the state of the Empire: war, corruption and surprise layoffs among the Imperial archivists. But your attention is drawn to dramatic stone outcroppings, wind whispering through the trees and the warmth of trusted company. Wait, is that a cup of wine floating downstream on a lotus leaf? The rule is that if it drifts to you, you have to drink it and spontaneously compose a poem. You're on your fifth cup and verses extolling nature's boundless mysteries, true friendship and the serious pursuit of knowledge spill from lips to scrolls.

Is this the treatment for some high-end vacation destination or luxury SUV commercial? No, it's an adaptation of the Spring Purification Ceremony held outside Shaoxing, China, in the year 353. It is the subject of "Meandering Stream At Lanting," an ink and color scroll by Japanese literati painter Suzuki Fuyo included in "Literati Modern," the inaugural presentation of the Terry Welch Collection at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

The Japanese literati painters, following the model of their Chinese predecessors, represented a social and artistic movement that celebrated the amateur, that is, the talented nonprofessional. Fujimoto Tesseki's "Pleasures of the Literati Life" series sums up the movement's social ethos in a series of colorful, lighthearted paintings that might be interpreted as a how-to manual. Their subject matter includes the lone philosopher sitting on a cliff, three friends getting drunk in a clearing, and two fellows playing go without shoes.

These men and women came from all walks of Japanese life - ex-samurai to merchant to commoner - and were unified by the desire to express their true character through painting. Unconstrained by academic formalism or the market-driven demands of patrons, Japanese literati painters experimented with abstraction, highly expressive brushwork and Western inventions such as impressionism and 3-D perspective. All of the works explore traditional conventions of density versus emptiness, and display a miraculous economy whether deploying an overwhelming number of brush strokes to evoke leaves or stone, or near-invisible strokes representing a snow-laden branch or the surface of water.

The innovative character of literati painting emerges after "seeing through" familiar Japanese painting aesthetics and subjects: symbolic landscapes, poetic portraits of animals and plants and idyllic scenes of daily life. Digesting the work in passing is absolutely satisfying, but sustained contemplation produces welcome side effects caused by the artists' mastery of juxtapositions and willingness to disrupt expectations.

For example, Doi Goga's series of skeletal silhouettes look at once like monkeys, ghosts and starving hermits, twisting the convention of the lone figure-in-nature. "Shouting Figure Holding Seals" is particularly striking because the figure holds one of the scarlet seals that usually hover in the corners of scroll paintings. This simple gesture breaks the conceptual barrier between subject and signature. The calligraphic commentary irreverently reads: "The ultimate truth of humanity resembles smoke, resembles a fart, appearing, yet quickly dispersed." This theory permeates the show, whether one is looking at ancient trees, a Japanese interpretation of Polynesian village life, or leaping white foxes.

Hirai Baisen captures this transience and magic like no other artist in the show. His works range from Ansel Adamsesque mountains to almost-Cubist portraits of rain-drenched villages. "Mount Horai," based on the legend of a Taoist monastery that can only be reached by immortals riding the backs of cranes, is probably the most inspirational. Rendered from the viewpoint of an immortal on final approach, the coppery mountain's geology is composed of diagonally skewed rectangular patches. It resolves in the middle of a Photoshop-perfect gradient which joins deep brown Earth with the barely-tinted silk of heaven. The green-roofed monastery is poised on one side of a chasm in the rock, pure white with red accents that are echoed by two climbing birds and the seal in the lower right corner.

The paths that these literati artists opened still inform contemporary Japanese visual culture, from the watercolor figures of children's book illustrator Taro Gomi, to the transformation magic in anime by Hayao Miyazaki, and the rich textures of Namco's "Afro Samurai" video game. Though this lineage is significant, it is the literati emphasis on social relationships and personal expression through art grounded in the appreciation of nature that offers us valuable perspective on coping with accelerating urbanization and the dangers of environmental irresponsibility.

David Goldberg is a writer and cultural critic lecturing in various departments at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.