It's almost a cliche at this point — the "other Hawai'i." Whenever someone makes something — a novel, a short film, a photograph, a painting — suggesting that life in Hawai'i, as in other places, is hard, an unwritten rule requires them to point out the difference between what they are showing and the paradisiacal images that lubricate Hawai'i's tourism industry. But 2006, the year the Ala Wai turned into an open sewer, is the year the tourist myth died — and "MetroHAWAI'I," the current exhibition at thiryninehotel, is the funeral. It's about time.

Students, teachers, community activists and others make up the cast of "MetroHAWAI'I." Their assignment: to depict Hawai'i — Honolulu in particular — in terms of its urbanness. City stuff — cars, traffic, buildings, crowds. They do so with style, a sense of history and an eye for contradictions.

University of Hawai'i painting instructor Ka-Ning Fong provides a helpful anchor for the show with his traditional, oil-on-canvas depiction of nighttime King Street, "King's Intersection." The most interesting thing about the painting is its ambiguity: it doesn't look like a particular corner of King Street; it looks like an amalgamation of every corner of King Street between University and Punchbowl. Its lighting derived exclusively from streetlamps, headlights and marquees, "King's Intersection" derives its familiarity from some weird, local math: total up every city block in Makiki and Mo'ili'ili, multiply by the number of saimin shops still open at 3 a.m., divide by the night.

Less ambiguous and more aggressive is Karen Kosasa and Stan Tomita's site-specific "Colonial Crimes: Settlers in Hawai'i." Issues of land use hover on the edge of practically every political conflict in Hawai'i, and "Colonial Crimes" starkly acknowledges this fact. Seven-foot-high images of a man and woman, their eyes blacked out, each holding a sign that says "settler."

Who, asks the piece, are the settlers? The real-estate investors? The descendants of missionaries? The Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese and Filipinos who came to work the plantations? Their children? Their grandchildren?

"Colonial Crimes" takes an extreme position on the issue: The man and woman in the pictures are Kosasa and Tomita themselves. Kosasa, third-generation local Japanese, assigns herself a portion of the guilt. "She indicts herself," says N. Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, curator of the show.

An especially odd printmaking project? Pop art? Found art? High concept? Who knows, and who cares which best describes Gaye Chun's "Historic Waikiki," a collection of maps, brochures and lovingly packaged chunks of Waikiki concrete that undermine Waikiki's commercial image by focusing on the ecological and human cost of maintaining that image. Much of "Historic Waikiki" is meant to be carted away, free of charge, and like all artists who deliberately toy with the acquisitive impulses of their viewers, Chun chips away at the Berlin Wall of bourgeois art — the one that separates the gallery from the gift shop.

The last word ought to go to the show's most ambitious piece: photographic/digital collage prints produced by adolescents in the Palama Settlement's In-Community Youth Treatment program. The kids, all placed in the program by court order, took a class called "Visual Investigations" as part of their treatment. Turned loose downtown with digital cameras, then given access to editing software, they gave program instructor David Goldberg more than he bargained for.

"The kids ended up pushing it in ways I didn't expect," he said. A diverse group, one thing the students had in common was early experience with the criminal justice system. "It's not just about the finished project," said Goldberg. "It's about every day I spent with them."

"MetroHAWAI'I" is the fullest realization yet of thirtyninehotel's mission to plug local art into the rest of the world, and vice versa. The myth of paradise is finished. What's next?

Joel Tannenbaum is a freelance writer covering art and literature.