The Honolulu Museum of Art has been running a penetrating series of exhibitions that explores the visual art of Japan through the sexually explicit sub-genre of "ukiyo-e," or woodblock prints of the Edo period (16151868), known as "shunga." These shows have been restrained by precisely interwoven academic narratives that fully contextualized the artists, their subjects and the culture.

"Modern Love" is the last of three installments, exploring shunga’s contemporary manifestations in carnal acts of all types and configurations, both real and imaginary, tender and extreme, between all sexes. From Araki Nobuyoshi’s "kinbaku" (bondage) photography to Masami Teraoka’s cephalopod-on-human action, manga artist est em’s gay centaurs and the surrealism of Maruo Suehiro’s all-seeing vagina, there is no shortage of challenging and stimulating imagery.

However, "Modern Love" is not a pornographic display. It is a precisely curated set of themes and aesthetic strategies that weaves Edo-period Japan into the "floating world" of today: the Internet. Sampling manga, paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs, the art historical importance of the show frames, but by no means censors, the frank and functional eroticism of the works.

This academic frame is about continuity, as demonstrated by Mayumi Oda’s prints of various New Orleans Storyville prostitutes, based on John Ernest Joseph Bellocq’s 1915 photographs. Echoing Edo-period portraits of the celebrated courtesans of Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district, Oda adapts the rich colors, fabric patterning and stylized flattening of the image plane. But her expressionistic style frees the women from the objectification that photorealism sometimes promotes.

In contrast, painter Yumiko Glover opts for realism, replacing shunga’s traditional locales — gardens, bedchambers and boudoirs — with public bathrooms and abstracted urban landscapes of modern Tokyo. Courtesans become schoolgirls in French maid costumes, and where the moon might have hung in a traditional sky, the iconic anime Space Battleship Yamato hovers instead.

Anna Tsubaki’s illustrations operate between the works of Glover and Oda but are no less concerned with continuity. She calls them "contemporary ukiyo-e." Inspired by early modern Japanese woodblock prints, but updated with rock-and-roll attitude, her work circulates via popular print media such as "Juxtapoz" and "Weekly Playboy," as well as the Web. The work featured here is focused largely on her ink-and-color representations of intricately bound women that dialog with Nobuyoshi’s photographs.

While the previous two shows challenged gender-related preconceptions of making and consuming shunga-inspired works, the emphasis on women artists in "Modern Love" introduces new perspectives. This is not just a matter of style (as with Tsubaki or Glover) but includes explorations of history, the creation of new channels for women to consume sexually oriented content, and outright boundary pushing.

Manga, Japan’s almost universal visual medium that enjoys an unrivaled depth and breadth of subject matter, is the primary vehicle for this feminist thrust of the show. Widely celebrated for its highly cinematic style and innovative uses of line, pattern and abstraction to represent various states of motion and emotion, all of the samples selected for "Modern Love" reflect innovations in drawing, composition, narrative and subject matter.

Both Anno Moyoco and Fumi Yoshinaga deal with the government-sanctioned brothels of the Yoshiwara district. Moyoco’s "Sakuran" is an in-depth look at the life of a top courtesan, and Yoshinaga’s "Ooku: The Inner Chambers" explores the same context in an alternate history where Japan is ruled by female shoguns. More than a gender alternation of the person behind the camera or holding the brush, these works critically reframe the male point of view that most people associate with erotica — and art history.

Thus, the power of the erotic image is unleashed in a slow grinding of our physiological reflexes against our moralistic ones. Some will be shocked by the lesbians in Takemiya Jin’s "Fragments of Love," while others will see gay bondage for the first time as portrayed (with an almost cruel attention to anatomic detail) in Tagame Gengoroh’s "Beards and Flesh." Some people will blush at Teraoka’s hermaphroditic sculptures, or completely miss the ironic play on traditional shunga in Hashiguchi Goyo’s pencil "self-portraits."

By transcending missionary positions, humans or reality itself, the work invites the viewer to see the entirety of human sexuality with greater clarity and scope. Safely filtered through twin lenses of historical distance and a benign contemporary exoticism, "Modern Love" revels in a daring diversity. Everyone will find a piece that marks a personal boundary, and there is probably no safer — and carefully considered — place to surrender to the friction.