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Artist Yoko Ono has launched a Wish Tree website to celebrate turning 90 on 18th February. The virtual ‘Wish Tree’ connects a worldwide digital audience who can post to the website, read other people’s wishes, as well as the many who are wishing Yoko a very Happy Birthday.
The first ‘Wish Tree’ that Yoko made was back in 1996, which was an interactive piece (the artist is known for) and invited people to participate with instructions that read:
Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree.
Ask your friend to do the same.
Keep Wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes
Yoko Ono’s interactive artwork WISH TREE (1996) has been integral to many of her exhibitions around the world in museums and cultural centres where people have been invited to write their personal wishes for peace and tie them to a tree branch.
Yoko continues to collect all the wishes from her Wish Trees from all over the world – currently totalling over a million. They are preserved and their messages continue on in the Wishing Well of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER – to send their power out the world and to the Universe.
On Yoko’s website, the artist explains how she first was inspired to create Wish Tree installations, and what they mean to her today at the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland:
“As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.
I have saved all the wishes people made and hung on my work, called ‘Wish Tree’ in many different countries. The number of those wishes I collected and kept has now reached over a million. They are preserved and their messages continue on in the Wishing Well of IMAGINE PEACE TOWER – to send their power out the world and to the Universe. I hope IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will give light to the strong wishes of World Peace from all corners of the planet and give encouragement, inspiration and a sense of solidarity in a world now filled with fear and confusion. Let us come together to realize a peaceful world. I consider myself very fortunate to see the dream my husband and I dreamed together become reality.”
The digital offering was created by John and Yoko’s son Sean Ono Lennon, to give the world an opportunity to make a wish. Not only this, the site is working with One Tree Planted, to also give visitors the opportunity to plant a real-life tree when they make their wish.
So far, thousands of wishes have been made, and trees planted, with celebrity well-wishers including Yoko’s step-son Julian Lennon, Ringo Starr, Liam Gallagher, Elton John and his husband David Furnish.
Yoko’s Imagine Peace Tower Website
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Michelle is a musician and composer from the UK. She has performed across the UK and Europe and is passionate about arts education and opportunities for women and girls.
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