It was Shanghai's perfect storm. Various political tempests in 19th-century China — the first Opium War, the Taiping Rebellion — transformed the lesser-known port city into a burgeoning urban crossroads on the ancient country's shore.

Although traditional Chinese wisdom warns against living in "interesting times," these particular upheavals proved auspicious for a group of artists who would emerge in the late 19th century as the Shanghai School.

You can see it all unfold — literally — in a collection of hanging scrolls, hand scrolls and fans on view in the Honolulu Academy of Arts exhibition "Chinese Painting of the Shanghai School."

The show has been mounted in two rotations: The first, which ran through June 5, incorporated landscape art; the second, on view now, focuses on the bird-and-flower genre, which includes fish, fruit, insects and animals.

We've seen such decorative scrolls so often that this intimate grouping, relatively hidden in the academy's Asian-art wing, could be easily overlooked.

That would be a shame. For lovers of Chinese art and history, the Shanghai School is anything but inconspicuous: It's the link between ancient and modern, East and West.

Much as the Impressionists heralded the onset of modernism in the West, so this loosely affiliated group of Chinese artists — bound more by economic boon than by strict stylistic coherence — signaled profound cultural change in the East.

China had long favored so-called "literati painting," an academic style that wed calligraphic brushwork and poetic sensibility. But by the late 19th century, the empire was drawing to a close; the Qing dynasty, China's last, would soon disappear — and with it, the scholar-painter class, which, at least publicly, eschewed commercialism in art.

Against this backdrop, cosmopolitan Shanghai was hopping. And driving aesthetic developments were market demands.

While "populist" styles are often associated with political agendas, Shanghai artists began to produce spirited, accessible work primarily to appeal to a broader audience of wealthy, merchant-class consumers.

As urban art purveyors, unlike previous centuries' wandering poet-painters, the Shanghai School artists increasingly turned away from traditional models, embracing a more decorative approach — and the West's innovative materials and methods.

Take, for example, Ren Yi's rendition of two chickens with flowers. Inked with newly available pigments, the work's rich coloration distinguishes it from earlier, often monochrome, literati painting.

Here, to convey an idea, essential sketch trumps finely contoured drawing. Like his Shanghai School peers, Ren Yi employs not the meticulous, academic gongbi style, but an exaggerated xieyi style, characterized by freehand brushstroke.

The influence of commercial prints, popular in the day, is apparent both in Ren Yi's cropped imagery and application of color, which bleeds slightly outside drawn lines (as a registered color print might).

The fans on view, including one collaborative piece, also reveal the importance of market trends. Since fans were small and required fewer materials, they were relatively affordable — and so, popular. Some were framed for display, as they appear here.

Sha Fu's fan depicts goldfish lingering under a wisteria's shade. The scene bodes good fortune for the buyer: According to gallery text, the Chinese word for fish (yu) sounds like the word for surplus. (Think how such symbolism has filtered down the market chain to contemporary Chinese art trinkets.)

Overall, the show is elegantly composed, stringing together relatively few works by noted masters into a lucid display. Contrasts between early and late Qing dynasty works, and between Shanghai School generations, are illustrative.

Particularly so is a fine pair of scrolls by father-and-son masters, Ren Xiong and Ren Yu. The father's work — boasting careful brushwork and opaque, print-like color — marries old and new. The son, even in homage, looks forward. Like his father, he's outlined his forms. But his coloration, splashed with red, is more vivid; his bird, more engaging; and his serpentine foliage, more graphic.

A vertical scroll of squirrels on pine boughs by a Buddhist artist, Xugu, is whimsical and metaphorical; its attitude implies modernity. And its unusual, abstracted brushwork suggests that Xugu may have employed one of the many innovative techniques that made the Shanghai scene.

Also of note is a mid-century hand scroll, created in the literati vein, by courtesan Xue Wu (who, according to exhibition signage, may have referenced the tradition for its intellectual clout). The scroll's monochrome and finely drawn masses of wild orchid leaves form a heavily patterned, exquisite design.

Less defined is the contextual relevance of other objects on display, which include not only brushes and art implements, but also massive furniture pieces from the early Qing dynasty, and a delightful collection of snuff bottles.

And it's too bad that the paintings appear in a two-part exhibition; the genres could have benefited from visual juxtaposition. In the bird-and-flower grouping currently on view, for example, the human transition to modern life is more ghost than seen reality.

Still, the show exposes the roots of Asian art's rapid commercialization, of its bustling cities and citified artists — and maybe also the roots of contemporary nostalgia for the poetic sensibilities of those early itinerant scholar-artists, who once rowed rural lakes at midnight, conversing with the moon.

Marie Carvalho is a freelance writer covering art and literature.