Yoko Ono is one of the most significant artists living today.
With her celebrated instructions, performances, installations, films, music, sculptures and photography she has remained at the vanguard of contemporary art since the 1960s.
Exhition presented in Shanghai and few other cities around China is curated by Yoko Ono herself and includes selection of Yoko Ono's most important piece....
Collaborating together with Zendai MoMA and Intrude project during her solo show in Shanghai will be 30 advertisment bilboards throughout city
Yoko Ono enroles/ comes in the lineage of Fluxus mouvement where she has actively participated from its creation at the beginning of the 60’s. She has developed an experimental work, often inspired of the everyday life. The clarity of the subject and the saving medium of the artist are in the service of an art in perpetual (gear) change. Supporting the Duchampian principle in wich the creator’s act can just be completed by the viewer, She gives thus an activ part. For exemple in his « Blue Room », which consist to 14 sentences written on the walls, the soil.. and whose the meaning is in totally contradiction with what the visitor view, YokoOno asks imagination.Likewise, « Wish Tree » gets the wishes and the dreams of each visitor.
Finally her wishes work, it always tainted of poetry and images of peace and (positiveness) like in « Exit » and her film « Fly » and others, where she speaks about the social role of women and her emancipation.
Exhibition Concept and Curator:
Yoko Ono
Organized by Gunnar Kvaran and Biljana Ciric
Presented by Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts
Partner:
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway
Special Thanks to Intrude 366 Art &Life Project, Zendai MoMA
Exhibition Opening:
November 29, 2008, 7pm
Press Conference:
November 28, 2008, 15:00 at Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts
Artist will be present at the opening and press conference.
From the time of her emergence in the New York art scene in the early 60’s, Yoko Ono has been reinventing herself and the philosophy of her working methods continually, making her a pioneer of avant-garde practices. Her art crosses and blends the boundaries of Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and Happenings, within which she has sustained her many different roles as artist, composer, poet, and antiwar activist for decades.
Yoko 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." Ono is one of the rare figures in the field of contemporary art that through her unparalleled practice has reached millions over the world.
Her significance on the international art scene as a woman at a time when there weren’t many other woman being recognized for their contributions, and rarely Asian representatives as well, makes her contribution even more unique.
Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts is honored to present the exhibition Yoko Ono-Fly, Yoko Ono’s first solo exhibition in China. The show will present Yoko Ono's diverse body of work from the early stages of her career through to her current work based on a series of instructions. The exhibition is organized with assistance from the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Gunnar Kvaran, and Biljana Ciric, the Ke Center’s resident curator.
Running alongside the presentation of Ono’s work in the Ke Center gallery spaces, the exhibition events will be spread throughout the city as well. Yoko Ono's 20 FLY billboard ads will be spread throughout the subway system in Shanghai during the month of November, while her Instruction work will be placed in different venues around city in galleries, restaurants, bars, shops, and so on.
Ono's work is often associated with the Fluxus movement and draws philosophically from such forms as Buddhism, haiku and Noh poetry, emphasizing minimalistic forms and suggestive imagery.
Yoko Ono's work was conceptual before the establishment of Conceptual Art. Instead of letting materials, media and methods lead the way of the creative act, Yoko Ono works form a foundational concept, which she does not elaborate upon visually, but rather with words that are at once a description and a definition, and yet still allow considerable scope for the performer.
Using plain words, the artist sets up objects, events, and rituals―actions that are given a precise elaboration when fulfilled by the performer, materially and/or mentally.
The starting point is the word, which links her practice with literature and in particular to poetry. Many analysts of Yoko Ono's art have rightly wanted to associate her Instructions with music and musical scores. Yoko Ono's Instructions are not poems; they are visual works of art, a new type of art that has escaped or broken away from material elaboration on the part of the artist.
The broad reach of Yoko Ono’s artistic oeuvre brings together various event forms and performances, happenings, advertisement art, film and video, to instructions and music.
Her work with advertising media, which she began in 1964 (of which the most famous piece is probably War is Over, 1969), helped her to reach a wider audience and to adopt the message form as a medium. The piece War is Over, created together with partner John Lennon, was part of the couples Peace Campaign of 1969-1970, launched after their public honeymoon in Holland. As for her films, they can be divided into the groupings: Fluxus films, films in collaboration with Lennon between 1968-1971, and a number of film scores.
Her conceptual photographic work Mommy is Beautiful, showed around the city of Liverpool, England during its Biennale, shows a woman’s breast and vagina, depicting the maternal aspects of the female body and touching upon the personal memories and social stereotypes projected onto these bodies.
An act of destructive is a notion that appears in many of Yoko Ono’s works especially after the 80’s, but most of the time followed by a thought of hope. In these works it’s more about the world seen from an outside perspective, where the artist draws attention to and forces the viewer to confront more or less horrifying events as in the Exit piece.
Once John Lennon said about Yoko Ono that she is “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” This exhibition aims to present the achievement of this unique figure, who if we were to define her as an artist would only result in the limiting of her vast contributions.
Facts about Yoko Ono
John Lennon once described her as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”
Ono produced sixteen films between 1966 and 1982 using film to record in real time settings with human presence at their centers. In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were married, and by that time the couple had already released a joint album called Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins…
Lennon referred to Ono in many of his songs. While still a member of the Beatles, he wrote: "The Ballad of John and Yoko", and he alluded to her indirectly in "Julia", a song dedicated to his mother, with the lyrics: "Ocean child calls me, so I sing a song of love" (The kanji 洋子, "Yoko", means "ocean child"). Other Lennon songs about Ono are said to include: "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", "Don't Let Me Down", "Come Together", "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", "Well Well Well", "Oh Yoko!", "I'm Losing You", "Bless You", and "Dear Yoko".
Her activism helped to construct an important part of cultural history in the form of an international peace movement that traveled the world over from 1969 into the 1970's. On the night of John Lennon's death, Ono had just finished recording what was to become widely recognized as her pop masterpiece "Walking On a Thin Ice".
Ono funded the construction and maintenance of the Strawberry Fields Memorial in New York City's Central Park, across from where Ono and Lennon once lived and where John died. It was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, which would have been his 45th birthday.
In 2000, she founded the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan.
On October 9, 2007, Ono dedicated a new memorial called the Imagine Peace Tower, located on the island of Videy, 1 km outside the Skarfabakki harbor, Reykjavík, Iceland. Each year, between October 9 and December 8, it projects a vertical beam of light high into the sky.
Ono performed at the opening ceremony for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy, wearing white like many of the others who performed during the ceremony, to symbolize the snow that makes the Winter Olympics possible. She read a free verse poem from a prepared script calling for peace in the world. The poem was an intro to a performance of the song "Imagine", Lennon's anthem to world peace.
Yoko Ono’s MySpace page gathered more than 22000 admirers, as is the same with her Facebook account, making her even more present in today’s media and world.
