Though children don’t necessarily have the ability to critically assess a work of art, they can be excellent barometers for measuring its sensory power. Children often respond to the raw strength of color, form, volume and line. They can read emotions, sense whimsy, feel fear and fall deeply into the effects of strong art. The young person I brought with me to Kaimuki’s Ektopia gallery to see Ileana C. Lee’s new installation had no idea what to expect, but he brought along a walking stick.

Upon arrival Ektopia’s director, Allan Jim, and Lee herself greeted us. Immediately my young companion charged into the field of leaning poles that fill the majority of the gallery space.

The fishing wire linking them to the ceiling was almost invisible, so it seemed as if we had stepped into a gathering of leaning totemic figures: green and blond bamboo staffs topped with a knob of lathed wood about the size of two fists, each decorated on the end with a trio of red, yellow and blue circles. They appeared to be magically balanced on a squat cylinder of bamboo, casting trios of shadows like a triple-time sundial.

Within moments the room was filled with the percussive sounds of wood thocking on bamboo as the youngster interpreted the installation as a martial arts training facility. He swung his stick to strike a pole, causing it to trace a conical pattern, then he moved on to another, and the next, spinning away, then pausing to block the imaginary foes "ambushing" him from behind.

Quickly carried away, he knocked more than one pole off its base — each ends with a nail that sits in a small hole in the concrete-weighted foundation — turning the dervishlike figures into chaotic pendulums.

I was momentarily aghast, and then Jim began moving through the installation, pronouncing it keiki-compatible and gently palming each pole’s "head." No pole can collide with its neighbors, and as Lee and I joined Jim and the boy, we got most of them in motion, spinning iterations of clockwise and counterclockwise traces, shadows lengthening and shrinking as if each were on its own planet.

A visitor’s passage through the space is clearly marked by the circles she or he leaves behind, like a stone skipping across the surface of a … pond!

When the room is at rest it is a lesson in statics, a 3-D drawing of kinetic possibility worked lovingly by hand and built from bamboo, mango and lychee woods. When the room is in motion it plays a silent symphony of oscillating frequencies that syncopate with footsteps, chuckles, light touches of flesh on wood. When I brought up the work’s resemblance to the training contraptions from classic martial arts films, Lee laughed with approval.

There’s a lot of math and physics happening in this space: trigonometry and angles, ratios of pole height to fishing line length to angular velocity, assorted flavors of periodicity, centrifugal force and even energetic levels of atomic particles.

It’s beautiful.

Lee has shown earlier versions of this installation in California and in the Philippines, but this is the first to involve motion. For her the installation is also about a sense of place. All of the materials are locally sourced, and she includes video loops of the surrounding environs’ natural cycles. For Oahu it’s waves, clouds, lily pond ripples … and automobile traffic climbing Kalanianaole near Maka­puu.

I’m not entirely sold on the videos, which are shown on two small screens on opposite sides of the installation. They are easily overlooked (the 21st-century boy ignored them) and perhaps too similar to the kind of footage that is shot for souvenir DVDs.

Seemingly hidden away in Ektopia’s small backroom is a set of Lee’s monoprints, executed with the same humble warmth, which effectively serve as blueprints for the installation.

One print, simply titled "Cones 1," is a quantum landscape of stippled and dashed concentric particle paths, colorful conical wormholes and vectors linking the various dimensions of the picture plane. Time spent with the rippled surfaces of the prints produces a new appreciation for their full expression in 3-D.

"Pond" is absolutely worth experiencing directly, for pictures and words are no substitute for a body set in motion. One’s gestures will be reduced to guaranteed acts of beauty, and one cannot help but move with grace, as Lee’s system adapts to one’s physical capacities with all of the flexibility and wholeness of water, air and time.