Ono’s most obvious message has always been peace and positive thinking. That was what first drew Lennon to her when they met back in 1966 during an exhibition of her work in London. The Beatle was fascinated by her “Ceiling Painting,” which consisted of a ladder leading up to a framed paper on the ceiling bearing the tiny word “YES.” “As if to deny her name, O-No, she shouted ‘yes’ so many times,” says Hong Ra Young, deputy director of the museum, which is cosponsoring the exhibit in South Korea along with New York’s Japan Society. " ‘Yes’ to peace, ‘yes’ to hope and ‘yes’ to life." One highlight of the exhibit is “Play It by Trust,” made up of a huge monochromatic game board and pieces, causing players to lose track of their positions and hence eliminate all competition.
As an artist Ono is playful and quite fond of rule-breaking. A photo of her 1964 performance “Cut Piece” shows her inviting audience members onstage to cut her clothing with scissors. According to the exhibition’s catalog, the performance is meant to symbolize the reciprocal relationship between exhibitionism and desire, victim and assailant, sadist and masochist. “A Box of Smile” (1967) consists of nothing more than a small metal box with a mirror at the bottom to reflect the viewer’s smile. Her “Three Spoons” (1967) shows four silver spoons, while “Four Spoons” (1968) displays three bronze spoons. The contradictory captions pose a Zen-like riddle about the relationship between language, object, image and reality. Ono said the work is about “illusional relationships,” adding that “the maps in our minds have very little to do with reality.” “Half-a-Room” (1967) is an odd-looking installation consisting of a one-room apartment in which everything, from the rug to the chair, has been cut in half.
The first major retrospective in Ono’s four decades as an artist, the Samsung exhibit originally opened in October 2000 at the Japan Society Gallery in New York. Then “Yes Yoko Ono” traveled to five other major North American museums, attracting 500,000 viewers. In 2001 the International Association of Art Critics voted it best museum show originating in New York. Since it opened in Seoul last month, the exhibition has drawn a continuous stream of viewers and highly favorable reviews. The Samsung museum’s largely transparent Rodin Gallery is the ideal showcase for Ono’s mostly black and white works; visiting Seoul for the first time to attend the opening ceremony, she said the presentation transforms her work into “Asian art.” Ever the performance artist, she then broke a large jar into pieces and handed them to the fans, promising to glue them together when they met again.
Ono has traveled a long way herself. Born into a prominent Japanese family in 1933, she moved to New York when she was a teenager. She soon became part of the Fluxus movement, which espoused interactive art. Her Asian philosophical framework, combined with Western-inspired freedom of expression, helped her produce a unique body of work that blurred the lines between drama, music, poetry and painting. Among other things, her art came to express deep opposition to the Vietnam War, including “War Is Over If You Want It” posters and the “Bed-In for Peace” performance during her 1969 honeymoon with Lennon. But critics and fans didn’t pay much attention; her work was overshadowed by her association with the Beatles. Her husband called her the world’s “most famous unknown artist,” saying, “Everybody knows her name but nobody knows what she does.” Thanks to “Yes Yoko Ono,” that’s no longer true–even in Asia.
