The term "art" is often mistakenly applied to technical efforts that seem beyond the possible and happen to be beautiful. The term "craft" is typically reserved for creative output that is functional and not as abstract as the arts and sciences.

"Bodies," a traveling exhibition currently located in a yet-to-be defined retail space close to Nordstrom in Ala Moana Center is mostly a craft show. Why? Because the preservation of corpses is a relentlessly practical pursuit whose aesthetic side effects are about reinforcing that which is familiar and idealized: the ancestor at his or her visual best, and at peace. At the same time, the equally practical educational value of "Bodies" as revelation of form, function and pathology challenges our perceptions in the way that only strong art can.

Here death appears to have been not only halted but dismissed with such finality that it would make Walt Disney or an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh gnash his teeth. These bodies have been perfectly flayed, split, sliced, exploded, sampled and exposed down to the last pale sinews and the most intimate openings. They aren't carved or chiseled representations created in an atelier or in the open air of a temple wall. Through a proprietary technique involving a vacuum chamber and toxic gasses, the body's water is replaced with plastic at the cellular level. The results are as shocking as a nightmare and as mundane as blockbuster computer graphics. After all, we've been exposed to ever-higher resolution images of the body's layers and systems in textbooks, television shows and clinics.

Two anonymous visitors' quotes bracket the range of community responses to "Bodies."

One reads: "I will never look at the prime rib carving station the same way," the other, "I never thought anything like this would come to Hawai'i."

In between there are frequent uses of the word "incredible," many references to "God's handiwork" and expressions of surprise to be engaged by the show at all. Many thought they would merely be grossed out or offended. Few expected to be moved. However, when our imaginations are pushed into surprising new spaces by having something revealed for the first time then the art of the exhibition takes over from the craft.

The most powerful examples feature systems of the body that have been preserved while the rest have been "dissolved."

We've all seen a naked skeleton, but not many people have seen a naked alimentary canal from tongue to anus, a naked circulatory system, a skin without organs or support (with every wrinkle, pore print and blemish intact) or the purity of a complete nervous system unobscured by muscle. It becomes apparent that the human being is a bizarre totality built out of different kinds of sponges, fabrics, braided ropes, a fat worm, hard Jell-O and tree root networks held together by a general cellular cloudiness penetrated by molecules, viruses, bacteria and fungus.

"Ar" is the Indo-European root of the word "art" and it means "to connect." Thus, in seriously contemplating these various "naked systems" in their 3D physicality, the h-ar-mony, ar-chitecture of the body's intraconnection becomes recognizable. To paraphrase one attendee's remarks to the woman he was with: "When we're alive, there's no hard distinction between one system and the other. ... It's all varying levels of softness sliding against itself."

Even our bones are a relative state of softness compared to what happens to them after we die. The power of this flexibility is expressed in no greater form than embryogenesis.

"Bodies" also presents a stunning sequence of a human baby's development in the womb. Some are separated by as little as two weeks, and it is quite powerful to see (scaled-down) physical development mirroring that of an adult human as early as four. This polymerization process is brutally objective — grounds for some to reject the show in general — and what it "means" lands squarely between the camps of life and choice, belonging to neither but claimable by either.

The "pathology section" attempts to tap into the same contention as the embryonic sequence. The "scared straight" displays of clogged arteries and blackened lungs will no doubt be effective motivators for some, but the tenuousness of life isn't as easily expressed in the signs of human failure. We have little built-in sympathy for the chain smoker or the person whose diet is dominated by fat and salt.

Because the human development sequence is actually "built" out of many people there is a subliminal emphasis on potential that the pathologies lack. In fact, the latter content emphasizes the show's lack of diversity: There is only one female subject. No obese people. No genetic diversity. No extremes. The truth of the matter cannot be escaped or justified by its roots in the autopsy and dissection-based anatomical illustrations of Andreas Vesalius. These are anonymous Chinese people, the unclaimed and unnamed dead, reduced to a glass-eyed averageness (or less) in the perfection of their mummification.

However, knowing that we should be critical of any and all images that end up before us, we should not let very real politics obscure what we are seeing: unknown people who have given us a brief glimpse at what we are all made of. For those who have eyes to see, this is nothing short of miraculous.

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.