Walking around Ong King's gallery space this month, you'd be forgiven for assuming that local tattooists Joel Albanez and Tino don't sleep or eat.

The sheer volume of work in their show, "Indigenous Rites: Life Works," would lead you to believe that the two spend every waking minute painting or drawing on something, be it a human arm or a canvas.

For Albanez, the work ethic is natural. "Every day, waking up, that's just my discipline," he says.

It's a way of doing things he learned from his father. "My dad's an artist, he's an architect, he's an engineer. He's always doing things. He's always pushed us to do art."

Born in the Philippines, Albanez moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of 8. Middle-class aspirations drew the clan to San Jose, where Albanez came of age as an artist.

"Just pure adventure" drew him to Honolulu, where he apprenticed at New Tribal Tattoo. There he developed the pan-Polynesian sensibility that informs his work. "Hawai'i's a younger extension of that whole Polynesian movement. Hawai'i is more of the new breed. The older Polynesians are like, from Southeast Asia, Borneo, New Guinea, Philippines. So Ha-wai'i's kind of new, you know?"

All of the above is spelled out in "Ancestric Vibes," one of the show's major pieces: a woodish, feminine figure, with flowing white hair, her arms covered in Polynesian patterns similar to the ones Albanez produces in his day job.

"Floating Circle," by co-exhibitor Tino, shows a similar approach — a pagoda is surrounded by flowers and human heads, tagger-style arrows protruding from the skulls, on a washed out, textured background.

If you can't adjust to the boardwalk/head shop sensibility of the duo's subjects — dragons, elfish figures, all things vaguely psychedelic — you may have trouble with "Indigenous Rites." If you appreciate it, however, for the intricate patterns on the fringes of nearly every work in the show, reflecting the artists' skills as tattooists, and the ferocity with which they attack the wood boards they often use instead of canvasses, you'll be pleased.

"Wood, you can just splatter, hit it, it's not bouncy," says Albanez. "I like the texture of wood, you know? With wood, you just bang it. You can sand it, nail it. Canvas is a bit more delicate."