Dictionaries would have us believe that memory is purely cognitive.

After all, without our minds, memory as we know it would not exist: To recall requires someone who can recall. This definition makes sense to us. So we compile family photographs, chant ancient tales, write memoirs, study histories, talk story about days passed; it's how we know the world.

"Reconstructing Memories," on view at the University of Hawai'i Art Gallery, makes the curious argument that while memory may require the human mind to reconstruct, it resides in the physical world.

That idea and the more obvious political argument that memory is, to begin with, a construct — and dangerously malleable — form the show's basis. It's a thoughtful show that, at its best, reconstructs memory to deconstruct it, and, at its worst, lapses into journalistic banality. But at all times, it's a show worth seeing.

Curator Aaron Kerner of San Francisco State University has brought together 12 local, national and international artists whose work explores the nature of memory and its political uses. Kerner selects artists who create within a thematic vein, producing a show that displays welcome coherence.

To Kerner, the show's geographic setting is relevant. Much as New York City was a featured character in HBO's "Sex and the City," so Hawai'i, suggests Kerner, is not only a location for this presentation, but also, as a critical site of historical memories, a player in the show. Its record of immigration, colonialism, war and racial relations offers a prime context, writes Kerner, "to discuss the very process of historical construction."

For reconstruction implies that memories were once constructed, but have failed — been lost, damaged, or were initially flawed. And reconstruction is not reconstitution; we don't just add water, and voila, our memories are intact. Construction and reconstruction suggest labor. We labor because what's remembered forms history, nation and identity; what's forgotten no longer impedes those who seek to construct — and reconstruct — such entities to their own ends.

Many artists assembled here take the politics of nation as their point of departure. Gaye Chan's inkjet prints, for example, alter and eliminate details in found photographs to reveal how national/colonial memories were initially constructed, and what they altered and eliminated. Her reconstructions (actually deconstructions) locate memories within geographies and images, physical constructs that enact, and remind us repeatedly of, who we are — even if that's who we actually aren't.

An image of tourists snapping photographs at Waikiki's now-defunct Kodak Hula Show, cast in eerie monochromatic red, is remarkable for Chan's pointed removal of the scene's "authentic" hula dancers — rendering the bystanders' rapture absurd — and especially for its nearly seamless vertical seam; on close inspection, she has joined two similar snapshots into one mirrorlike picture. Her imaging skills implicate reconstruction, which is potentially as deceptive as construction — the sort of superb self-referential paradox that elevates Chan's work beyond obvious polemics.

Memory's loss and reconstruction is not just a political act; it's also an emotional one. Perhaps because memory is a human checkpoint — validating our views of world and self — nothing is more disorienting or terrifying than memory lost, as demonstrated by our collective horror of cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Several exhibition artists emotionally fuse political and personal memories. Vietnamese-born artist Binh Danh reconstructs memories of a war-torn homeland that he never knew, having immigrated to the U.S. as a toddler. His path back is tenuously fabricated from fragments of historical imagery and familial story, a narrative deficiency that inspires emotionally urgent, evocative work.

His innovative technique — chlorophyll prints that literally "grow" images of war into leaves, which are then suspended in resin — underscores memory's fragility, its organic nature, and the human need to capture it.

Japanese artist Katsushige Nakahashi creates a full-scale Hockneyesque rendition of a Zero airplane, pieced together from photographs of a 1:32 scale toy model. The replica specifically recalls the Japanese fighter plane that crash-landed on Ni'ihau during the attack on Pearl Harbor, unleashing a chain of events that culminated in the internment of Japanese Americans. While there's implicit critique here, there's also nostalgia, and emotional conflict: Nakahashi's father served as a Zero maintenance crewman during World War II. The work's ritualistic burning on Dec. 13 will enact the physicality of memory.

If Nakahashi's Zero is the exhibition's centerpiece, then Masami Teraoka's two stunning triptychs are its anchors. Brilliantly marrying surrealistic iconography that dates to Hieronymus Bosch (a Roman Catholic cardinal, for example, depicted with a cardinal's bird head) to iconographies of the Gothic altarpiece, Japanese erotic prints and Renaissance paintings, Teraoka's pastiches seem the exhibition's most evolved (and, oddly, most intimate and subtle) examinations of nation, power and manipulation.

The multiple interventions of "Reconstructing Memories" supply a rich, exposed seam for viewers to examine memory's multiple breaches. In truth, it deserves not to be painstakingly described — and so reconstructed — by a reviewer, but to be seen. See it.

Marie Carvalho writes about art and literature.