How accurately would every single negative thing anyone has ever said about you reflect or approximate who you are? Would that accumulation be interesting enough to make your life a work of art? Now consider a giant ball made of triangular wedges that were a traditional form for packaging medicine, each wrapped in the pages of a Korean book. The wide variety of bundles comes in different sizes, and the artist has fit them together to form a landscape of peaks, valleys, rough plains and mountain ranges.

How was it built? Fitted like a jigsaw puzzle? Packed or rolled like a snowball? Gathered like a dust bunny? Layered like a wasp’s nest or a pearl? At 10 feet across and textured like an asteroid, is it somehow light enough to slowly turn in the breeze of Spal­ding House’s ventilation? Questions indeed, posed in "Less = More," the Hono­lulu Museum of Art’s exploration of mathematics through art.

The wall text for Kwang Young Chun’s "Aggregation 03-AU 130" is the length of a tweet that reads, "A sandy beach. The roar of a rainstorm. A giant ball of paper triangles. When does a group of innumerable units become a singular entity?" Here’s a hint: If answers are given upfront, you will stop thinking.

This is the core inquiry that "Less = More" pursues, varying the definition of "unit" to include objects, folds, punctures, platonic solids, distances, spools of thread and blocks of color.

All the works in the show are driven by processes the viewer should imagine rewinding. The folds in Michael Lafosse and Richard Alexander’s origami flowers are so seamless that they seem plucked from last century’s video games, back when Lara Croft’s exaggerated parts were crude meshes of triangles.

There is an efficiency-driven elegance to early vector graphics and 3-D modeling, but it pales in comparison with that same effort applied in a real world that is unmarred by pixels or computational restrictions.

Generally, only those who contemplate the extremes of strength and weakness, plenty and scarcity, concern themselves with how the interactions of "little things" produce the ungovernable, irresistible, sometimes overwhelming "big things." "Less = More" invites more of us to explore what can emerge when, in an attempt to invoke the truth of an experience, artists choose to work under tight (and often self-imposed) constraints.

The gestures are often simple, like printmaking collective .5PPI’s inked blocks pressed onto individual sheets of paper that are arranged mosaic style in order to create an overall image.

Their simultaneous magnification and abstraction of Pierre Bonnard’s "Child With Lamp" marks their first foray into full color and iterates on their ongoing exploration of how viewing distance can create radically different art experiences. Rather than simply dividing Bonnard’s piece into a grid and coming up with average colors to fill each box, .5PPI incorporates a generous use of white space and a technique of stacking different-sized wood-block "pixels" one on top of the other to blend their respective ink colors.

Kumi Yamashita’s "Constellation — Mana" is a jaw-dropping take on a similar theory of multiplied simplicity. Here the organizing grid is a field of equally spaced metal brads around which a single black thread has been wound.

All of the light, shadow and contour of this amazing portrait is achieved by recrossing certain sections to build up contrast. Generally speaking, Yama­shita is using thread to "shade" the image, but the resulting reality is complex enough to convey the glimmer in Mana’s eyes and the contour of her lips.

This is probably the most philosophical of the Spal­ding House shows to date, asking questions of the visitor that are more direct than those posed by "HI Society," which focused on social studies. After all, beneath the structures of class, politics and ethnicity are universal systems of biology and physics — things best described by mathematics but rendered by art.

"Less = More" presents concrete artistic experiments in analogy; its very aesthetics help the viewer contemplate the depths of such a counterintuitive assertion.

We know that Chun’s packages, for instance, reference bouts with illness. And if each stood for a death, at what point might the sphere represent a genocide, or a preservation of peace? How many cells does it take for the primitive act of repeated division to become fully human?

Then what?