Yoko Ono, a mysterious and affectionate woman. A woman who is good at creating artistic events in silence. An 86-year-old woman who is still focused on performing well. Naked and peaceful, it almost belongs to her royal theme.
Yoko Ono was born in 1933 to an aristocratic family in Tokyo, Japan. His ancestor was a retainer of Tachibana Muneshige, the daimyō of Yanagawa, Kyushu during the Sengoku period.
In 1956, she married the Japanese composer Ichiyanagi in New York, after which she began to venture into the Greenwich Village of New York and became an active member of the American avant-garde art scene.
In 1964, Yoko Ono performed her most famous performance, Slices, for the first time at Carnegie Hall: a randomly selected audience member was asked to cut her clothes into pieces with scissors until she was completely naked. She was 32 years old.
In September 1966, at the age of 33, Yoko Ono performed her famous Fluxus performance art Slice in London. At that time, John Lennon sat in the audience, and Yoko Ono sat up straight on the stage and said, "Come, cut my clothes anywhere; each person cut no larger than a postcard, and please give this fragment to anyone you love." The audience took the stage one after another, cutting Yoko's clothes in silence until she was naked. This was Lennon's first meeting yoko.
On March 20, 1969, Lennon married Yoko Ono, who was 7 years his senior, in Gibraltar. After marrying Lennon, Lennon and Yoko began to appear as a whole: the two worked together to create experimental music and release records. During the honeymoon, the two spent a week in bed at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam, where they were interviewed by the world media to promote their "peace in bed operations."
In 1968, the duo released the album Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, with Lennon and Yoko, whose cover was fully nude.
On the evening of December 8, 1980, Lennon and Yoko walked out of the studio while they were finishing guitar music for Yoko's song "Walking on Thin Ice." Yoko and her husband discussed, "Why don't we have dinner before we go home?" Lennon replied, "No, let's go home, because I want to see Sean before I go to bed." As usual, the couple, who were returning home to see their son, walked to their own Dakota apartment building in Manhattan, while mark David Chapman's bullets were waiting for them on the other side of the street. Death ended Yoko and Lennon's 12-year marriage, eventually making her the first widow in the music industry.
In September 2003, at the age of 70, Yoko performed "Slices" again in Paris. She said on stage, "Come, cut my clothes anywhere; no more than a postcard cut by each person, and please give this fragment to anyone you love." ”
Explaining the performance 37 years later, she said: "When I first did it in 1964, my heart was full of anger and uneasiness, but this time, I did it with love for you, for me, for the whole world. Even though she was seen as the culprit that led to the final dissolution of the Beatles, even though Lennon did not appear publicly for her for 5 years, and even after 20 years after Lennon's death, he still did not give up promoting his ideal of "love and peace" and was attacked by some fans as a rich in the name of her deceased husband, but for decades Yoko Ono still advocated her own position in the field of contemporary art and music.
She once participated in the chorus of "Every Man Has a Man Who Loves Him" at a gay rally, which is a "gay version" of the old song "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him" written more than 20 years ago, expressing support for gay marriage only. Therefore, even after much controversy, Yoko Ono still practices the expression and narrative mode rarely found by Oriental artists. Because in her artistic perspective, the artwork and the viewer are designed by her absolutely natural design, which is not her intention, and is displayed and observed along her train of thought, boring and tedious, but unusually calm and objective and real.
In 2007, Yoko Ono's new album Yes, I'm a Witch caused a huge sensation in the international music scene, an avant-garde album that blended hip-hop, jazz, funk, electronic, rock and even dance music. Yoko Ono's voice, 75, is still as sweet and stunning as a girl's, which has to be said to be a spectacle. In addition, on this album, there are a total of 16 top producers in the American music industry who have written for Yoko Ono.
On February 25, 2009, the Venice Biennale announced that Yoko Ono would be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award ——— Golden Lion for her "revolutionary breakthrough in the art of language." But to this day, the vast majority of people, for her identity label, I am afraid that Lennon is still widow. There is still polarized controversy and evaluation of her artwork.
In the same year, Yoko Ono reorganized the band Plastic Ono and released Between My Head and the Sky under the name Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Anyone familiar with her should know that the name, Yoko Ono's most recent use, dates back to 1973. In the restructured list of members of the Plastic Ono Band, the names of her son Sean Lennon appeared with Lennon. Sean, who inherited his parents' musical talent, has an eclectic creativity in his music. Although in 1995, under the leadership of Paul McCartney, he and his mother Yoko Ono had a single collaboration. But in the true sense of cooperation, mother and son are the first time.
On January 20, 2014, Yoko Ono issued an open letter calling on Japan to stop killing dolphins. The open letter has been published on Yoko Ono's website, ImaginePeace. Local fishermen in Taiji Town, Higashi-Mulou-gun, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, hunt a large number of dolphins every year. In response, Yoko Ono issued an open letter to the local fishermen in Taiji Town and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe calling for the cessation of dolphin hunting, which pointed out: "Dolphin hunting has received countless criticisms and condemnations in Japan. ”
On January 27, 2014, the Beatles received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and Yoko Ono attended the 56th Annual Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles as the widow of John Lennon, one of the Beatles' members.
On July 30, 2014, Yoko Ono visited Hiroshima City, Japan, to welcome the Hiroshima Atomic BombIng Anniversary held on August 6, 2014, along with local university students and atomic bomb victims, folding thousands of paper cranes and praying for peace.
In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will host Yoko Ono's large-scale solo exhibition "Yoko Ono: A Woman's Stage" from May 17 to September 7, which will showcase the brilliant crystallization of the artist Yoko Ono's nearly 40 years of artistic career, including paintings on paper, installations, audio tapes, video recordings, and various objects used in performance art performances.
It's not so much an art exhibition as it is a "Yoko Ono"-style fashion show, because in the 2015 solo exhibition, the audience will be invited to interact intimately with the artist Yoko Ono to get a hands-on experience of avant-garde art. In addition, this exhibition is also the second time that artist Yoko Ono has 'appeared' at the MoMA booth after more than 40 years, so it has attracted strong attention from all parties in the New York art community.
Is she a philosopher? litterateur? artist? Musicians? Or a filmmaker? It's hard to decide, but it's no exaggeration to give her any of these titles, as she was able to navigate each of these areas with ease in the 1960s. Unfortunately, despite her talents, such a strange woman has been burdened by fame all her life, and has always carried the fame of her predecessor, John Lennon, the soul of the "Beatles".