Yoko Ono. Wish Tree Garden

What is your greatest wish? Come and share your dreams on Papirøen’s quayside and make your contribution to the Japanese artist Yoko Ono’s art installation Wish Tree Garden. Since the 1980s Yoko Ono has been working on the piece Wish Tree. The work consists of one or more trees planted in places all around the world, with each tree species adapted, on Yoko Ono’s instructions, to the place and its climate. On a slip of paper, a so-called ‘wish tag’, anyone can write a wish which is afterwards hung from the branches of the trees. All the wishes are regularly collected and sent to Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower on the island of Viðey in Kollafjörður Bay, Iceland: an art installation that consists of a tall column of light dedicated to Ono’s late husband, the musician John Lennon. The wishes from CC are buried around the Peace Tower along with the millions of other wishes that have been collected since 1996 from other places in the world.

Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree Garden has been created specifically for Copenhagen Contemporary and will be a permanent part of CC’s harbour area in front of the exhibition halls from 1 July 2016.

Yoko Ono was born in 1933 in Tokyo and moved to New York in 1953, where she lives and works today. She studied Music and Poetry there at the Sarah Lawrence College. In the 1960s she was part of the artist group Fluxus, where she became particularly well known for her performance and conceptual art.