Art Exhibit Traces A Path To The Stars

It’s a lunar volvelle, a device dating to the medieval era used to chart the passage of the moon across the sky and determine days and dates. But this particular volvelle has two distinguishing features. First, it involves fragments of poetry. Second, the family members of poet and artist Monica Ong appear in a small parade in the center as one moves through the possible positions on the volvelle. Using the volvelle also reveals different fragments of poetry, so that each day produces a new poem, introduces a family member, all in the process of scientific observation.

The volvelle is one small piece of Planetaria, an engrossing show now running at the gallery at the Institute Library through Sept. 8.

In Planetaria, Ong ​“blends poetry, astronomy, printmaking, assemblage, and personal meditations on family and working motherhood, into a compelling, tactile exhibit which telescopes between the personal and the cosmic. Chinese and Western constellations are reconfigured and refreshed into new iterations to reflect the realities of the now,” an accompanying note reads. ​“Planetaria is designed to engage viewers with their hands and eyes to reconsider the heavens, and the meanings and stories they tell. Based on her own background and experiences, Monica Ong invites audiences across all disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies, one where everyone belongs.”

Planetaria is also a feast of art objects, from the volvelle, to light boxes, to star charts annotated with floating poetry, to a new generation of tarot cards, to manufactured ephemera from lost histories of astronomy real and imagined, and more. The blend of language and images fits with the swirl of ideas at play.

“When I make art and poetry I always look for subjects that I want to learn about,” Ong said. Her interest in Chinese cosmology turned out to reach not only into her interest in astronomy and other sciences, but into the her own family history and culture, and the national politics of the past few years. And Planetaria allowed her to work in a way that moved among words, sound, light, and images in a way that she has for her entire life.

Ong’s family fled China for the Philippines during World War II, and in time emigrated to the United States. Her parents aren’t native speakers of English, and as a child, ​“my experience of language was always about combining sounds and images and movement and some words to communicate.” She grew up in Northbrook, Ill. and trained as a designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, focusing on digital graphics and audio sound art. She now works as a designer for the Yale University Library in its Digital Humanities Laboratory.

“Every time I think about a series of work, in my head, it’s not necessarily a manuscript or a book,” Ong said. She thinks instead about ​“how it can exist as an interesting object” or ​“how can poetry come off the page in a way that gets people to really engage with it?” In combining words with sounds and images, ​“there’s suddenly a huge space that opens up for the narrative to unfold for people.”

She was only ​“vaguely” familiar with the Chinese system of constellations as a child. ​“Every fall we would have a moon festival and my family would get together, play games, and have a feast, and then there would be the story about a woman who drank a potion for everlasting life, and she went to the moon but her lover stayed on Earth.”

As an adult, she knew there was much more to it. When she became a parent, she wanted to be able to pass down cultural knowledge to her son. So she began learning. The cardinal directions of the sky, in Chinese cosmology, are each ruled by a different animal. Some constellation shapes in Greek cosmology appear in Chinese cosmology as well. The stars that form the constellation Westerners know as Orion are also prominent in China’s night sky, but the three stars that form his belt in Western cosmology are three gods of fortune in China, and his bow is a turtle’s beak. Nearby stars form a tiger.

“There’s a lot less emphasis on mythical gods,” Ong said. ​“It’s a lot more a reflection of the hierarchy of society. So there are asterisms for accountants and archivists, as well as the king’s chariot drivers, and empty wells and fields. It’s a geography of the way the Emperor saw life.” The North Star, then, which remains at a fixed point in the sky, is ​“the Emperor of Heaven,” Ong said, orbited by four guards, and his palace around him, protected by walls.

As Ong learned more, she saw that the Chinese system — like the Greek system Western civilization inherited — is ​“centered around male power,” with the attached stories detailing why the Emperor should be obeyed and perhaps feared. That was not a system of values she intended to hand down. So ​“I decided I wanted to rewrite this from a female point of view.”

Ong’s retelling, for example, transforms the Emperor’s fortress into a womb. ​“Instead of an enclosure, it’s opening things up,” becoming a ​“passage,” she said. ​“In a way I wrote this thinking about how precarious this journey of womanhood is. How do we navigate all these stories of conquest? How do we find a way to survive and rethink those maps to empower ourselves?”

Ong’s journey back into her own culture was thus also a way of confronting it, shaping it to suit her needs in the present, a process that she found mirroring the national reckoning with its own history in the past few years. ​“What’s empowering about being an artist is that you can say, ​‘how can we flip the script and write from a different point of view that centers the reader? How can we rethink our stories in a way that’s more inclusive for everyone?’ The palace is not up there; it’s actually your own life.”

Ong was working on the pieces in Planetaria while politics reached its boiling point last summer. She found that the focus on cosmology allowed her to ​“slow down a bit” and ​“take a longer view” — and at the same time, find a place in the conversation.

“Whenever something horrible is happening, people say ​‘it’s written in the stars.’ I get really feisty about that,” Ong said. Too often that mindset, she found, was a way to tell people to accept something that might be unacceptable. ​“It made me think a lot about our creation stories. How would I write this differently as a marginalized woman?” And ​“as a parent, I was thinking: ​‘what is my son going to inherit? What stories of masculinity are we passing on?’ If the stories that are out there about the sky weren’t good enough for me, I don’t think they’re good enough for him.” And ​“we can’t wait for somebody else to make it better.”

But Planetaria isn’t a lecture; it’s an exploration, a way to follow Ong on her journey and take our own trip, leading to discoveries about the narratives we have had handed down to us, how they have shaped us, and how we can, in turn, shape them and reshape ourselves. ​“Poetry and art are a way for us to learn things that are uncomfortable for us,” Ong said.

Planetaria runs at the Institute Library through Sept. 8. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.