In 1818, during a circumnavigation on the ship "Kamchatka", the famous Russian traveler Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin visited the Sandwich Islands. He left a detailed and humorous description of the country and its inhabitants. Among the research team of the "Kamchatka" was 27-year-old artist Mikhail Tikhano, a former serf of Prince D.N. Golitsyn. He was tasked with accurately reflecting the ethnographic and anthropological details of the journey, and he created a unique series of portraits of the local residents. Before him and for a long time after (until Paul Gauguin), no one could so accurately convey the anthropological type of the Polynesian on paper. As D. Forbes writes in his book "Encounters with Paradise", "Tikhano's sketches are not only the most accurate in reflecting reality but also the most mysterious and enigmatic of everything ever created about Hawaii."

Another Russian whose work is closely associated with Hawaii in the 20th century and is known as "Hawaiian Modernism" is Vladimir Osipov, an architect and designer from Vladivostok. His family did not return from a trip to Japan after news of the 1917 revolution. After graduating from Berkeley University, he could not find work and, at a friend's invitation, went to Honolulu. This marked the beginning of his long connection with Hawaii. Osipov not only brought modern ideas to Hawaiian architecture but also designed buildings that took into account the climate, landscape, and cultural traditions of Hawaii. His projects included private homes, an airport (recently renovated), an IBM building, school classrooms, apartment buildings, and temples. Osipov's name is known to every Hawaiian, and in 2007, the year of his centenary, an exhibition dedicated to his life and work was held at the Academy of Arts in Honolulu.

If the research of the expedition led by Y. Lisyansky laid the foundation for oceanography as a science, for a long time this science was developed at the State Hawaiian University by Alex Malakhov, a Russian émigré and citizen of New Zealand. Somewhere on the islands lives the great-great-great-granddaughter of A. Pushkin, a pleasant blue-eyed woman with the surname Li, taken from her Chinese husband. In downtown Honolulu, there is a law firm run by a lawyer with the surname Turbin.

After the collapse of the USSR and the opening of Hawaii to former Soviet citizens, many settlers, contract workers, and tourists from Russia appeared on the islands. The Russian community became active, and an honorary consul was appointed. The Russian-Hawaiian romance continues.