The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed.
About seven years ago, I entered Onghena’s studio space. We planned a studio visit to discuss our shared obsession with the moon, but I soon learned that her interest focused on a part I was unfamiliar with. Because for her, it is not about the image, astrology, or the celestial body we can see in the sky. Her fascination is specifically with the far side of the moon, the dark side. Dark, in this sense, stands for unknown rather than without light, the unseen, unfamiliar, or the back, like the recto versus the verso side of a print.
The crater landscape of the familiar part, on which people imagine a mochi-pounding rabbit or a man’s face, is the one we recognize. One quickly forgets that we always see the same side of the beautifully lit surface of the sphere. The lunar phases entertain an idea of a changing perspective; we see different parts and amounts, but always of the same and familiar side. Whichever century, time of year, wherever you are on earth, our planet and the moon always move in a way that, from our earthly perspective, only one side is visible. The moon’s “dark side” does not stay dark; the sunlight on the sphere’s surface is evenly distributed. This creates the lunar cycle of four weeks, moving from a new moon waxing to full bathing in sunlight and waning to new and dark again. Considering both sides creates a complete process of repetition and transition that isn’t based on a flat surface from an external gaze but thinks of the moon within its spatial relations.
Complex relationality deployed by the moon was a perspective also exercised in 17th-century Kyōto by Prince Toshihito, who also had a strong obsession with the moon. He initiated the building of the Katsura Rikyū Imperial Villa. This large estate became internationally known as one of the finest examples of Japanese architecture and garden design. In his time, the waxing and waning of the moon were considered sacred symbols of rebirth; therefore, moon viewing was an essential and much-loved contemplative activity. Katsura Rikyū accommodates moon-viewing activities through several pavilions located around the large pond central to the gardens. As poetry and storytelling were very popular among the royals, and Toshihito was a dedicated writer, reciting poems and tales became an essential part of moon-viewing ceremonies. A famous story in his time was that of Katsura-Otoko, about a man exiled to the moon with the task of cutting down a magical Katsura tree growing on its surface. While the punished man pruned and cut the tree, he could never finish the job as the tree regrew its branches each time, creating the lunar cycles. Simultaneously, the story represents the birth of agriculture by connecting the human-plant relation with its cyclical character impacted by the moon.
A rough three hundred years after Prince Toshihito’s impressive investment in observing the lunar cycles, the moon’s far side became part of our visual repertoire. In 1959, it was photographed by the Soviet Union space probe Luna 3 and was printed and published in the first Atlas of the Far Side in 1960. In her publication Analysis on the Other Side of the Moon (2016), Onghena mapped out the surface and explored the far side by organizing its craters, their depth and circumference, and names on page spreads. She worked with information that stayed out of reach and in the dark for so long, and in black ink, she shared the information on white pages. By processing its information, printing, and bookmaking, both an experience of familiarity with the surface and estrangement and mystery grow. A contrast that accelerates Onghena’s curiosity and longing to discover expands to the vast outer edges of known and unknown, from the near mundane closeness of a dusty surface to the elusive planetary and cosmic scale between information and awe, emptiness, and physical material. Space.
We are going to start our journey into space, into the enormous black mass.
Why is it black?
What is space?
— An Onghena
An Onghena presents an exhibition inspired by the color black and an immense fascination for the book as an art object. At KIKA gallery, she shows a number of books that unfold into space and investigates the status and reading of a book versus that of a mural work. Each book contains 90 pages referring to the theory that a sheet folded 45 times equals the distance to the moon. The next fold, following the exponent to reach 90, provides the entire traverse back to Earth. The relationship between the book and space is performed as part of the opening, during which she starts from voluminous books, cuts, unfolds, and hangs the prints in the gallery space, returning pages into a print. A recording of this performance in which she hangs the prints and organizes them visually on the walls of the space is part of the exhibition.
Next to the transformative function between book and space, folding forms a method for this work to visualize the tactile touch of paper, to reveal the beauty of the materials and the (im)possibilities in handling books and paper. By amplifying the creases and folds visually, Onghena invites the viewer to imagine the sound of the book-making process. A fold can transform a sheet into a holder, a page, or the becoming of a different object. Each fold is created differently, starting from another angle, using a different side, like each sheet has its own rules and instructions.
The prints An Onghena brings to Kyoto are an effort to observe the night sky. In 2015, Onghena visited Iceland, where she tried to capture the celestial sphere and Nordic lights. It was explicitly the photos that seemed to have failed that she printed and started working with. At first, the failure meant a lack of information, a field of darkness that initially seemed not to hold any meaning.
But by zooming into the images, they reveal a few flared stars popping up in a large field of grainy darkness. Onghena started printing them with Riso on different kinds of paper and folding them. The initial nothingness now distinguishes clouds and dots of information. It is unclear if the current printed images visually depict the actual Icelandic sky, her visual perception, effects of the camera, transition to the Riso master, or happy accidents when printing the photos on grainy paper.
Onghena recomposed the images.
Onghena displays the far side of these prints, motivated by her curiosity about where the invisible intersects with the characteristics of the material and the practice of making. She uses and shows both the recto and verso sides of the paper, the front and the back of each print, to expose transparency, the interaction between the surfaces, and her making process. Like the back of a painting doesn’t show the depiction planned by the artist but reveals the effects of their actions with the material.
Onghena now invites the spectator to observe what first seems a void and a blank space. Still, there is a lot to discover within the black and the white. Slight differences in the actions create the possibility to dive deeper into the contrasts of the print, the material, its surface, creases, and foldings that present Onghena’s fascination with the vast unknown space of the cosmos in her work. The attention to detail makes way for the discovery of something vast.
Black is a utopia, a search for the truth and something absolute.
— An Onghena
Text by Marjolein van der Loo, translated to Japanese by Jun’ichiro ISHII
The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed, is part of the project Book&Space, a collaboration between Limestone Books Maastricht (NL) and KIKA gallery Kyoto (JP) initiated by curator Marjolein van der Loo. Book&Space offers an exhibition opportunity in Kyoto for artists/bookmakers in the Maastricht border region, including Aachen, Liege, and Hasselt (NL, DE, BE). Book&Space takes the artist’s book as a starting point and wants to investigate how a book can relate to space by activating the KIKA gallery with an exhibition.
An Onghena was selected through an Open Call in the Autumn of 2023.
The proposal has been selected by a professional jury in the Netherlands and Japan:
Kazuya Nakayama (Professor, Kyoto University of Arts)
Charlotte Fouche-Ishii (Director, École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy)
Koichiro Osaka (Independent Curator/director of curatorial space Asakusa, Associate Professor,
Kyoto University of Arts).
Anne Büscher (artist/designer and head of Meldkamer exhibition space)
Jo Frenken (artist, bookmaker, and former head of the Jan van Eyck Printing & Publishing lab)
Karin Peulen (artist and head of the Fine Art department and print lab at Art University PXL, Hasselt)
The project is supported by The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Japan.
With special thanks to:
Margriet Thissen, Romy Finke, Ton van de Ven, Carmen Vollebergh, Rob van Avesaath, Joris Verbiest, Heidi Kennes, Kurt Vanbelleghem, Inge Van Ermengem, Jan van Eyck Academie, Jhen Chen