In an anti-intellectual culture like ours, consuming and producing contemporary art is generally considered a luxury. But when the fantasy farm falls on hard times and pure escapism no longer satisfies, art gains the opportunity to become stronger. Political undertones and social commentaries emerge, often in direct engagement with the public. Think of Dorothea Lange's photographs, Diego Rivera's murals and Duke Ellington's compositions. Perhaps under extreme circumstances artists recognize that they have nothing or everything to lose, and therefore something more to say.

Far from a Depression-era artistic mobilization, our recession develops amid transforming robots and Facebook and Twitter feeds. Nevertheless, The Contemporary Museum (downsized by the global economic collapse) is presenting two projects normally found in smaller, independent galleries. With separate installations by Michael Arcega and Yoshihiro Suda, the museum has generated a rather agile dialogue between their work. Arcega and Yoshihiro's projects evoke and invoke forces at play in our crisis, cutting through (to) peoples' anxieties and sharpening feelings that grow dull during easier times.

For anxiety is what one feels either surging or draining when approaching the museum's entrance. Brightly colored sets of radiating cords connect the ground to small florescent tents distributed throughout the monkeypod tree's neuronlike maze of branches. Placed in a way that mixes human intention and insect opportunism, they could be futuristic outposts or eggs laid by arboreal robot parasites. Are the cords a means of communication, construction or transportation? As the "how" and "why" that catalyzes any encounter with contemporary art begins to bubble, concepts of community, invasion, refuge and surveillance emerge. You are free to sculpt the foam into outlines of social significance, or simply defer to aesthetics and see the trees as lovingly adorned.

In either case the tree's inherent beauty is not enough; it must be adapted to our purposes. In Hawai'i we love to balance a direct engagement with raw nature against specialized tactics for doing so. We seek "empty" lava fields and beaches for monster custom 4x4s, and celebrate the lone heroics required to conquer avalanches of water. Labor-intensive and often expensive, this is our folk minimalism, and it morphs smoothly into our appreciation for Japanese aesthetic approaches to using only what is absolutely necessary in architecture, painting and design. In the museum's galleries, Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda pushes the limits of nothingness. One enters and, either intrigued or alarmed, wonders for a moment where the art is.

With its 50,000-plus cubic feet of space as empty as the nation's 401(k) accounts, the galleries' blank white walls are perfectly illuminated. Any visitor will be struck with the space's raw qualities. Materials. Acoustics. Air circulation. This is close to what architect Hart Wood experienced when the building was finished, and what the museum's preparators enjoy between shows.

With the stark, artificial nature of the museum at full volume, the curator's question reverberates silently for the viewer: "What should be in this space?" Better yet, what happened in this space?

Artist and writer Marcia Morse described Suda's installation as a taste of a time after people. His tiny weeds grow in the cracks between the floors and molding after a quiet, private apocalypse, the kind you overlook because you're checking your voice mail.

Just as Arcega's "construction lines" guide the eye, Suda uses the perspectival convergence and boundary-marking of corners to escort the visitor from his spaces of quiet wilderness to galleries occupied by lone flowers growing out of the walls. Carved from Japanese magnolia wood, Suda renders the flowers down to their wilting petals and drooping stamens, and paints them with true-to-life details that include the onset of decay and holes chewed by insects. His seamless mounting techniques defy gravity and showcase his ability to emulate the internally calculated balance that plants express effortlessly.

Arcega and Suda are engaged in a dialogue of inverses and complementary gestures. Time spent with one installation enriches appreciation of the other. Suda's work becomes "more fake" the closer one gets, while Arcega's narrative becomes "more real" with enforced distance. Each viewer will find their own point of critical and aesthetic engagement somewhere between.

Both artists created site-specific responses: Where Arcega directly engaged the venerable monkeypods, Suda carved azalea and magnolia "portraits" of flowers growing on the grounds. Suda's sculptural trompe l'oeil brings the natural into the constructed space of the museum, complementing Arcega's illusory nomadic mini-civilization colonizing the nature outside.

Both artists erase traces of physical labor in favor of manipulating our belief in appearances — we are free to experience the work, but in no case allowed to touch it!

What a perfect reflection of contemporary life among the ruins of pyramid schemes, after the conversion of living into various "financial instruments" powered by nothing more than faith in the superficial art of the deal.

David A.M. Goldberg is an independent cultural critic, writer and lecturer at Kapi'olani Community College.