Hawai'i is connected to the rest of the world by routes whose rates of throughput range from the slow pulses of genetic heritage to the gigahertz frequencies of telecommunications.

Our brand of globalism is highly nuanced and runs deeper than our economic dependency on tourism. It ranges from ecological — the impassive beneficence of the trade winds sweeps our air pollution to the far-off land of Ainokea — to the stuff of science fiction — that 70-story golf ball in Pearl Harbor is a radar system that can alert the military if Kim Jong Il launches a paper airplane. As far as popular culture goes, it was smarter to camp out for "Transformers" than for an iPhone; your chance of access was higher.

While our geographic isolation has produced singular forms and styles of life, why can its limitations be so easily measured in terms of access to international contemporary art? Clearly, importing cars, movies and life (from tourists to avian flu) is more profitable than importing the images, ideas and conversations carried by the arts. We've got international film festivals, guest curators and visiting scholars, but it's really no contest. Hollywood and Silicon Valley set the standards. Techno-popes like Steve Jobs define the new rituals of communication (fondle your phone), and action spectacle directors like Michael Bay supply representations that "the people" expect: urban destruction, robots that cross-dress as cars and romance as defined in magazines like Maxim.

Such sensationalism is not the exclusive domain of mass media, as strong artwork regularly takes more challenging paths through the same constellation of cultural attractors.

Do an image search on Manuel Ocampo and (cue movie preview guy's voice): In a world gone mad, prepare to be shocked and awed by paintings that easily surpass the violence, chaos and thrills of any summer blockbuster.

However, it would be a significant economic and logistical challenge for local galleries and institutions to import artwork of sufficient power to create blockbuster-busters that could compete with multimillion-dollar visual effects, toilet humor and gut-punching explosions. Like Megatron said: "You have failed me again ..."

Fortunately, unpredictable guerrilla tactics are always an appropriate response to overwhelming force. Just so, thirtyninehotel, a kind of transformer that goes from art gallery to bar/lounge to church-of-sound, has imported "Manila Envelope: A Snapshot of Contemporary Arts Culture in Metro Manila."

If a painting from Ocampo's "Virgin Destroyer" period is a culture unto itself (characterized by societal decay, apocalypse and compromised religious and political figureheads), then the artists of "Manila Envelope" would be ethnographers and anthropologists working in photography, drawing, sculpture, video and text. Those familiar with Manila's brutal class struggles, or who have seen Dela Llana and Gamazon's independent, Manila-set horror film "Cavite," know what to expect.

"Manila Envelope" can be summarized by surreal passages like this one from Yason Banal's "A Fairytale (Baklang Titi)": "Chenelyn come out of the closet like a Snooky Serna in Blusag Itim and did not look a tad Murriah Carrey, Miss Nigeria or Girlie Rodis." This is gay slang from contemporary Manila, newly-minted archetypes and code-words that (via a glossary) translate into judgments, praises and insults. Post-colonial 21st Century art can be a lot like advertising: Your ignorance is medium for the message.

MM Yu's grid of 21 photographs of Metro Manila extends Banal's text. Each image documents how physical, ideological and cultural trash circulates through Manila and gets stuck and piled up in all manner of corners, fences and loops. She frames moments where trash becomes code for something else. Reading the images like a comic strip yields surprising punctuations: sketches of popular movie stars such as Yoda; urban swamps; razor wire and Catholic icons; posters from the last campaign to oust another corrupt politician; a discarded photograph of a happy Filipino family.

Carlos Celdran's videos further flatten Yu's sequence into a series of PowerPoint slides. "Miss Manila" is a laundry list that describes Celdran's ideal Manila (e.g., "No Visiting Forces Agreement") intercut with vintage postcards that illustrate his proclamations with a warped nostalgia. His "Myths and Legends for Filipinos" is a long series of critical statements about Filipino identity which often escape their ethnic constraints: "Your capacity for loyalty borders on the delusional."

Painter Gerardo Tan demonstrates a line of flight out of such ideological prisons with "It's Not Hard to Put a Painting in a Mailbox," an evil Decepticon of a piece which went from Manila to show curator Jenifer K. Wofford thanks to his finely-detailed painted reproductions of stamps. His technique of painting at the scale and resolution of art textbooks evolved from his experience with an actual Cézanne painting that didn't measure up to its high-quality reproductions and accompanying propaganda. This fantastic hybrid of copyright violation, federal crime and middle finger raised to the guardians of Western art history is the "laissez fail" genius of survival and cultural production in Metro Manila — and the entire urbanizing Third World.

These artists practice in a fluid community of art spaces that can coalesce and dissolve overnight. Real life in Manila is deeply cinematic, shot through with blood, pollution, superstar entertainers and revolution. The malls and entertainment are world class. Landslides of garbage wipe out shantytowns. Bootleg media rules. Life is Wal-Mart cheap, and bar patrons check their weapons at the door. Salamat to Wofford for sorting through such a landscape. Its artists and activists display brilliant ripostes of creativity and popular resistance.

"Manila Envelope" reminds us that we can be deeply informed by shows that fold, roll up and get moved via suitcases, e-mail attachments and global shipping. More so than by another summer of catapulted cars and military helicopters rollerblading down L.A. freeways.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.