ISSUE NO. 06: YOKO ONO

ISSUE NO. 06’S SUPPLEMENT FEATURES ARCHIVAL WORK BY AN ARTIST WHO ASKS US TO SEE, PARTICIPATE, AND IMAGINE DIFFERENTLY.

By Connor Monahan

Toward the end of the Second World War, displaced from Tokyo to the countryside, Yoko and her younger sibling would lie on their backs and look up at the sky, imagining meals they could not have, exchanging menus in the air as a way of enduring their hunger.

Her first instruction-based works grew from the memory of this activity, which she would later recall as perhaps her first work of art.

“Since then, all my life, I have been in love with the sky,” she later wrote. “Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me.”

The sky above her was a constant, but one defined by change. Looking at it could not alter the circumstances around her, but it could open another space in the imagination, where for a moment something impossible could be made present.

Yoko’s work would come to occupy this space between what is and what might be. It remains deliberately unfinished, continuing through the imagination, presence, and actions of others. Yoko invites us to touch, to dream together, to shake hands, to bring our shadows together until they become one. These moments, however small, create space for connection and communication.

In works like IMAGINE PEACE and WAR IS OVER! If you want it, that invitation is sent out into the world. The possibility of peace is placed in our hands, something we have to make together. Yoko has described her approach to peace not as optimism, but as pragmatism: If we cannot create peace and end war, we will not survive. If we cannot imagine another reality, how can we begin to make one?

The sky is still there, shared by all of us, its possibilities unfinished.