| It is difficult to write something new and revolutionary about someone who herself created new perceptions in the artistic realm, emphasizing the importance of the message as a medium. |  |
Yoko Ono
It is difficult to write something new and revolutionary about someone who herself created new perceptions in the artistic realm, emphasizing the importance of the message as a medium. Yoko Ono’s messages have permeated generations, and she has many followers today. Much of her longevity and significance results from her ability to generate cross-generational beliefs in the ideas of love and unity that are the essence of self-being.Ono’s first solo exhibition in China today means a great deal, not least of all in introducing the role of the spiritual in the field of art production. In times when the art market and institutionalization seem to drain all creativity from such processes, to introduce such a prominent figure who has operated outside of the market system and institutional complex for decades is a very utopian approach to art-making and a comment on the true mission of artists.
Ono’s work has maintained a pure approach to the dematerialization of the art-making process over the years, emphasizing the message that art brings spirituality of experience instead of objecthood. Through her issues—ones that humankind has faced for decades and will continue to grapple with—she tries to reveal the narrow passage toward self-perception that we avoid and fear to face.
One of the first works that I was drawn to was Ono’s Instruction Series, an invitation to the audience to finish the piece and to create the work’s meaning, whereby Ono only provides the direction in which we should go. Fly, for example, asks: how do we fly, and can we fly? She questions all of this through a simple direction.
Ono’s work is not based in a studio practice, but rather closely connected to her way of living and approach to life. She wrote, “Art is not merely a duplication of life. To assimilate art in life is different from art duplicating life.” Yoko Ono exists in such a way within society that if one labels her as just an artist, her contribution to the arts and to the world will be limited. In fact, she is a composer, artist, peace activist, and filmmaker. Although she has recently celebrated her 75th birthday, Ono still actively promotes her wish for a better world that many were not able to understand or accept back in the early 60s. Her presence on the Internet has become an open platform where she is able to share ideas with people that still believe in the idea of “one world.”
To return to the Instructions Series, the artist worked with a very simplistic language in order to turn the experience itself into a crucial part of the work, instructing people to produce work themselves, giving them the opportunity to participate, to get involved first with their inner selves and then the world. Her instructions culminated in the book Grapefruit, an anthology of instructions working around and through the concept of language.
One of the earliest of Yoko Ono’s performance pieces, entitled Lighting Peace, evolved in the mid-50s and dealt with her ritual lighting of a match and watching it burn until she became very calm. This piece, like many of her performance pieces, comes from her instructions: “Light a match and watch it till it goes out.” (1955) Ono’s event Fly occurred in 1964, and the exhibition in Shanghai uses this title to make reference to this piece in Tokyo, Naiqua, on April 25. For the performance event she sent a postcard that said, “Come prepared to fly.” On the day of the performance she invited artist friends to perform the piece, flying from ladders, though Yoko Ono herself wasn’t present during the event. In later performances she asked the audience to fly from different heights. Through her performances Yoko Ono forces the audience into a heightened awareness of their actions and the environment that they occupy.
Ono’s marriage to John Lennon in 1969 and their subsequent collaborations, especially the Bed-In for Peace series of events in Amsterdam and Montreal, attracted great media attention. Before they were married they released an album together, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Ono and Lennon’s collaboration on War is Over is one of their largest advertising campaigns, launched after their wedding in 12 major cities around the world. The text reads in each country’s language: “WAR IS OVER/IF YOU WANT IT/Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.”
Ono has made a unique contribution to the history of experimental film. In the film Fly, a naked female body is shown lying motionless. Throughout most of the film the artist shows close-ups of a fly on the human body, and at the end she reveals the complete body of the woman. The soundtrack of the film is composed of Yoko Ono’s vocals. In the majority of her films, she explores woman’s inner freedom, while her approach towards the female body often makes it difficult to place her in the feminist realm.
The Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, is a piece in memory of John Lennon. The light tower is illuminated on the day of Lennon’s birthday, the day of his death, and certain other auspicious occasions that Yoko Ono agreed to upon completion of the structure, like the first week of spring, etc.
Ono’s early Lighting Peace shares a similar life vision. Imagine Peace Tower explores the desire to keep the momentary permanent, where light is no longer in temporal existence, but is permanent same as sun existence in our life that is not necessarily visually present every day; it emits and returns to us, continually reminding us to keep on wishing.
The mission of contemporary art is to push the boundaries of the senses, exploring new grounds that in turn open up people’s minds, revealing new experiences that are sensual, intellectual, and connected to the essence of being human. Yoko Ono continues to accomplish the mission as communicator and mediator in providing the environment for certain experiences that the human core of us still yearns for.
