Seeing is one thing, witnessing another. At least that's what the words tell us. Seeing is a physical process with science to back it up: I see green grass. Witnessing calls to mind evidence, and acts that demand higher mental processes such as visual recall or integrity: I witnessed the green van hit the boy in the crosswalk. Witnessing, we're told, is an ideological act.

But this fine distinction is also false. Seeing relies on perception, a faulty shorthand mired in experience and memory, to help us navigate the world. Research shows that from an early age, we not only see a face, but also "read" it. We don't just report an event that we've seen. We frame it within a context — a sense-making that begins even as we're seeing. In other words, representation can't help but reveal an agenda.

Visual artists have known this all along. Art is about framing — even literally. Every image within the frame is chosen visual tender; the real subject of a documentary film is the eye behind the camera. So when artists invoke the word "witness," they're generally talking politics.

The six artists in the Koa Gallery's exhibition, "Witnessing," are no exception, earnestly taking on monumental social ills from war to oppression, and making the show's claim of "modest" documentary intentions seem, well, falsely modest.

While thematic group shows can stultify artists, this content-driven theme has its benefits. If truths are nebulous shape shifters and no one person a reliable witness, then multiple viewpoints are necessary to reconstruct reality. And a visual panoply is certainly engaging. For example, Lori Ohtani addresses homelessness by linking possession and identity; Jessica Ke'ala Kim-Campuspos concocts stews of poi and paint to confront colonialism; and Noe Tanigawa fuses eyes into amber-esque waxen arrangements that represent collective witnessing.

The show's latent theme of paralysis finds its poster girl in painter Tsugumi Iwasaki-Higbee, who turns from acrylics to installation in "Passive Witness." The piece strives toward the evocative lyricism of, say, Felix Gonzalez-Torres' spare gallery installations. A plastic tube crammed with strata of newspaper, shredded credit cards, pills and hair, is suspended — like the sword of Damocles, signaling impending doom — over a circle of jagged stone. (It's a treat to see dirt in a Honolulu gallery.) Placated by commerce and pharmaceuticals, the unwitting witness finds herself imprisoned in her own refuse.

Keiko Hatano's series of national flowers embroidered onto camouflage cloth takes a different tack: witnessing the exquisite. Traditionally rendered, the works find inspiration in the Japanese custom of collecting communal stitches to adorn stomach bands, given as symbolic protection to young soldiers. Hatano's red close-up flowers stitch themselves along a tree-grows-in-Brooklyn theory: Beauty — quietly, ordinarily, regardless of poverty or strife — blossoms stubbornly on this soil and that alike.

"Evidence," poet Gail Harada's shadow-box assemblage, superimposes personal relics — charts, bills, blood counts and vials that track the artist's chemotherapy treatment for cancer — onto journalistic accounts of Iraqi war dead. The two mounting horrors bleed visually into each other: A newspaper charts the war's march through Iraqi cities as circular orange blotches that cluster and expand, much as cells divide and multiply into intractable, insidious growths. It's good visual instinct to conflate the two processes — and effective, exposing both as oddly distant and dehumanizing.

The modern artist has long played social jester and conscience, provoking with raw, risky methods — from Hannah Hoch's fascist-era collages to Andres Serrano's infamous corporeal comment on commodification of religion, "Piss Christ." The relative reticence of "Witnessing" belies undercurrents of rage and terror. Camouflage fabric stretched over embroidery hoops is perfect and new; frames of rose-petaled paper encase medical waste. Such neatness appears quaint and sanitized in an era marked by the proliferation of images, a hyper-awareness that renders recent horrors unusually vivid.

Though these six artists approach extraordinary ideas with grace and sincerity, their politeness also may invite unintended consequences. For example, Ohtani's sublime homeless figure levitates cleanly above ground, carefully draped — and concealed — in a high-tech sheet, creating a strangely comfortable, voyeuristic environment. When asked by the artist to name their most prized possessions, most visitors respond in positive, abstract terms ("life itself") that fail to implicate or draw themselves into the messy web of having versus not-having.

Kim-Campuspos' glass-jar assemblages duly note this irony: A container preserves memory, but also imposes structure — an imposition that her work attributes to the Western need to "define and label" indigenous cultural beliefs. For this reason, her strongest piece conceptually is "Po," a jar sealed and painted in opaque black, obscuring its contents.

It's true that history has a terrible track record of abusive containment. But maybe that need to classify and frame experience, to make it tractable, is also sometimes simply human: Witness "Witnessing."

Freelance writer Marie Carvalho covers art, literature and theater.