YES YOKO ONO

This is the fist opportunity to show the art of Yoko Ono (born in Tokyo, 1933) in full scale exhibition in Tokyo. This exhibition will feature approximately 130 of her works, including art objects and films created in the '60s, which were never introduced in Japan on this scale, and large installations made in the recent years. This exhibition is based on the "Yes Yoko Ono" exhibition - a compendium of her lifetime work - organized by the Japan Society, and held in art museums around the U.S., starting in New York (from November 2000 to January 2003). We have added Ex-it (wooden coffin installation) and Morning Beams (rope installation) to the items from the U.S. exhibition.

Yoko Ono is internationally recognized as an artist, poet, and composer who has worked alternatively at the fringe and mainstream of culture for more than 40 years. Born in Japan 1933 and a resident of New York since the mid- 1950s, Ono has emerged over and over a forerunner of new art forms that mix and expand different media. Hers is a social art that relies on participants-not just to be appreciated in the abstract, but to actually be made real and completed by the viewer.

Yoko Ono's work arises in part from the Dadaist debates on art and life, championed in New York during the 1950s by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, that aimed to break down the boundaries between high art and everyday life. Ono expanded upon this sensibility to embrace the mind as a player in the act and experience of art. Her early scores and instructions-many compiled in her legendary 1964 anthology, Grapefruit-established to the primacy of concept, language and participation that was central to such international art movements as Fluxus and Conceptual Art. Later, together with her husband, John Lennon, she produced numerous films, recordings and mass-media campaigns for world peace that engaged the public in a remarkable process of mental-and social-transformation. Expressing her ideas in range of new art forms, Ono was an innovative and provocative force in the New York, Tokyo, and London vanguards for much to the 1960s and 1970s.

The use of Asian art and thought to inspire new forms of artistic expression is one of the greatest forces in history of modern art. Ono, whose work draws from Zen Buddhism as well as from the minimalist poetics of haiku and Noh theater, communicates certain Japanese aesthetics that have transformed the course of contemporary art. Presenting works that express a kind of metaphysical intelligence and poetic beauty, this exhibition explores the artist ad a key transmitter of those non-Western ideas to the international avant-garde.

Today, Yoko Ono continues to create an art that distills everyday things into pure, up-close experiences of contemplation. Her recent work challenges us to see the invisible-to make ideas, imagination, and perception the content of art and the practice of life. Her long career-producing poetry and scores, films and music, objects and installations-is linked by her profound intent to seek and provoke question, and to engage us in that search. For Yoko Ono, being "unfinished" is state of grace. Pressetext

YES YOKO ONO
Yoko Ono
Kuratoren: Alexandra Munroe, John Hendricks
Organisation: Japan Society, New York.