Death is portraiture's problem, and its raison d'etre: That portraits survive their subjects, holding sitters' long-lapsed beauty ransom in gold-painted pigments or silver emulsion, is their attraction and detraction. As Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray lamented of his own fabled portrait, "Why should it keep what I must lose?"

He needn't have worried so. Though paint was the 19th century's Botox, to youth, a museum's portrait gallery usually recalls more dust than desire. Or, as I once heard a boy say while being forcibly led through a bevy of frame-encrusted lovelies, "Their eyes creep me out." What's fresh and beautiful itself prefers flesh — or at least an animated avatar — to dry pigments.

Still, it's no coincidence that portraiture is an old, fashionable genre. Patrons guarantee a measure of immortality for their idealized visages, and, if more money is involved, association in life and death with illustrious artists destined for even greater ends. How a sitter is rendered tells less, maybe, about his or her era than about human ambition as every era's root. Identity has never been apolitical.

That's not necessarily the educational message behind Mission Houses Museum's new exhibition, "Larger than Life: Portraits & Portrait Making"; but it's what leaks out.

Mission Houses remixes the reputedly archaic genre, standing traditional missionary and Hawaiian royal portraits from its collection alongside contemporary photographs of tattooed kanaka maoli. It's a welcome new vision, befitting the museum's first outing under new director David de la Torre. In practice, though, the show's physical division of historical works by media, with contemporary works in a separate room, fails to engender direct visual comparison between various eras' formal presentations of identity. That's too bad, but not an unspannable disjunction — just one that requires viewers' imagination.

GHOSTLY GLIMPSES

Consider the show's vintage daguerreotypes. The printed plates are breathtakingly ghostlike; images appear whole and gradated from a slim head-on angle, but, when viewed aslant, shimmer and dematerialize into portions — a shock of hair, the geography of strong bones against a face's hollows. These monochrome apparitions are not unlike Allyn Bromley's contemporary color screen-print of Thurston Twigg-Smith, whose face, reworked by hand on metallic paper, floats between glass, shape-shifting as one walks the room. Both vintage and contemporary images mirror the real; yet identity is uncannily immaterial. What they share is a certain mystery common to good portraiture (though Bromley's is achieved more consciously).

It's a charming quality, mystery, a subtlety perhaps more difficult to come by when portraits are heavily yoked to power, as are most works here. Hawaiian historical players are well represented, some in a fascinating selection of arcane "silhouette" portraits by Persis Goodale Thurston. Many, such as Tess Nelson's curiously glam circa 1930 posthumous painting of Princess Ka'iulani, are adroitly made and historically relevant, though less memorable than the show's more personal, obscure images.

That observation holds true, too, in the contemporary room, where some pieces, such as Chuck Davis' abstract "portrait" named for the mythological figure Psyche, seem misplaced, and others, including Linny Morris Cunningham's quartet of modern-day Honolulu legends (Don Ho et al., for Hana Hou magazine covers) appear flatly commercial. Form follows function; the portraits tell most who's who.

Notable exceptions include the portrait of missionary descendant Twigg-Smith, which transcends its sitter's power quotient, and Joseph Singer's ephemeral photograph of playwright Victoria Kneubuhl. James Gay Sawkins' 1850 painting of Laura Fish Judd and her daughter, Juliet, elicits intangibles. And a photograph of Ka'iulani, laced into a fine-boned garment and posed deep in thought, reveals her nobility not in details or dress, but in her own, uncommodifiable expression.

The show's other standouts are among its most intimate works. Two 1930s-40s watercolors by a Maui reverend's wife, Clarissa Armstrong, are terrific. Armstrong displays acute sensitivity to her lesser-known subjects; her deliberately disproportional treatment of one's broad, lined face feels very contemporary (made more so, coincidentally, by its mildewed background, which appears intentionally abject).

HAUNTING VIDEO

Mark Kadota's humanistic self-portrait in oils affirms his abundant grasp of paint. More haunting, though, is his phantasmagoric video, "Surfaces." Kadota's original music echoes ethereally as multiple subjects' faces contort, one by one, distorted by dreamy slow-mo and sequential freeze-frames. The video's skidding movements query not just its sitters' fluid identities, but portraiture itself: Can representative images, however naked or nuanced or mercurial, capture a spiritual essence beyond nostalgia? On that question, "Surfaces" remains resolutely evocative.

So is this an art show, or a show about known people — and their corollary, social power? The exhibition's announcement lists the contemporary portrait artists' names alongside names of the historical sitters (versus their more obscure historical painters or etchers or photographers); that's a confusing, and telling, choice.

Wilde wrote, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible."