Yoko Ono

• 1. Introduction

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  Yoko Ono walked into the Indica Gallery in London on the 7th of November 1966 carrying a ladder painted white. At the top of the ladder hung a magnifying glass, and through it, anyone willing to climb could read a single word printed in miniature on a tiny canvas: YES. That one positive syllable, in a world of concept art that was, as she later recalled, "anti-everything", changed the course of two lives and, by many measures, of popular culture itself.

  Born in Tokyo on the 18th of February 1933 to a banker descended from samurai and a mother trained in the shamisen and koto, Ono spent her childhood moving between continents as her father's career dictated. She survived the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 in a bunker in the city's Azabu district, and she emerged from that period, by her own account, with an "aggressive" attitude that would define her art for decades.

  What does it mean to be called "the world's most famous unknown artist"? John Lennon said it about his own wife, and the phrase has the sting of truth. Ono's name has been attached to the Beatles' dissolution, to anti-war protests conducted from hotel beds, to avant-garde performances in which audiences were invited to cut her clothing with scissors. She has twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts. She has also won a Grammy Award, built memorials on two continents, and produced a body of conceptual art that major museums are still cataloguing today. The life behind all of that is the subject of this documentary.

• 2. Roots and War

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  Eisuke Ono, Yoko's father, came from a long line of samurai warrior-scholars and was himself a former classical pianist who became a wealthy banker. Her mother Isoko was the granddaughter of an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. The kanji characters of Yoko's name, 洋子, mean "ocean child".

  Two weeks before Yoko was born, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by the Yokohama Specie Bank, and the family followed. Yoko first met her father when she was two years old. The family relocated again to Japan in 1937, and she enrolled at Tokyo's elite Gakushuin school, also known as the Peers School. Piano lessons began at age four and continued until she was twelve or thirteen. Her mother, who could read Japanese musical scores and was trained in several traditional instruments, took her to kabuki performances.

  The family moved to New York City in 1940, then to Japan again the following year after Eisuke was posted to Hanoi in French Indochina. Yoko remained in Tokyo throughout World War II. During the firebombing of the 9th of March 1945, she sheltered with family members in a bunker in the Azabu district. Afterward, she went to the Karuizawa mountain resort, where starvation was rampant. Her mother traded a German-made sewing machine for sixty kilograms of rice to feed the family. Eisuke, who had been in what Ono later told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was a concentration camp in Saigon, was believed by the family to be a prisoner of war in China.

  After the war, with her family in Scarsdale, New York, Yoko stayed behind in Japan. By April 1946, Gakushuin had reopened and she re-enrolled, finding herself a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan. At fourteen she began vocal training in lieder-singing, adding yet another musical discipline to a childhood already saturated with sound.

• 3. The Avant-Garde Crucible

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  Ono graduated from Gakushuin in 1951 and became the first woman accepted into the philosophy program at Gakushuin University, though she left after two semesters. In September 1952 she joined her family in New York and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied poetry with Alastair Reid, English literature with Kathryn Mansell, and music composition with the Viennese-trained Andre Singer.

  Her heroes at that time were the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. She told Singer so, and Singer introduced her to the work of Edgar Varese, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. Singer also told her that there was a category for what she was doing: avant-garde. In 1956 she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence feeling "asphyxiated by conservative teachers" and the same year married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was studying at Juilliard. Her parents cut off her financially after the wedding, even though they had hosted the reception.

  Ichiyanagi had been a student of Cage, and through that connection Ono first met Cage at the New School for Social Research. After Cage stopped teaching there in the summer of 1960, she rented a loft at 112 Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan, using it as studio, home, and performance space. She allowed composer La Monte Young to organize concerts there. Between December 1960 and June 1961, the loft hosted a series of events attended by figures including Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim.

  George Maciunas, the Lithuanian-American artist who founded the Fluxus group in the early 1960s, gave Ono her first solo exhibition at his AG Gallery in New York in 1961. He formally invited her to join Fluxus; she declined, preferring independence. But she did collaborate with Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, George Brecht, and the poet Jackson Mac Low. That same year, at the 258-seat Carnegie Recital Hall, she gave her first major public performance. One of the works she showed there, Painting to Be Stepped On, was a scrap of canvas placed on the floor that became a completed artwork only as footprints accumulated on it. With that gesture, she was proposing that a work of art did not need to hang on a wall to be real.

• 4. Cut Piece and Grapefruit

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  Cut Piece was first performed on the 7th of November 1964 at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto. Ono knelt on stage dressed in her best suit, a pair of scissors placed in front of her, and invited audience members to climb up and cut away pieces of her clothing. She sat silently until she chose to end the piece. Jon Hendricks, writing in the catalogue to Ono's Japan Society retrospective, described the work as unveiling "the interpersonal alienation that characterizes social relationships between subjects".

  The piece travelled. It was performed at the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo that same year, at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1965, and at London's Africa Center in 1966 as part of Gustav Metzger's Destruction in Art Symposium. Ono reprised it in Paris in 2003 in what she described as a moment when "we need to trust each other". The Canadian singer Peaches reprised it at Ono's own Meltdown festival in London in 2013.

  Grapefruit, first published in 1964, operates by a similar logic of invitation. The small book reads as a set of instructions through which the artwork is completed either physically or in the reader's imagination. One example: "Hide and Seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." David Bourdon, art critic for The Village Voice and Vogue, called it "one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s". He also noted that Ono's conceptual approach only became acceptable to the mainstream when white male artists later "did virtually the same things". Simon and Schuster published the most widely distributed edition in 1971. Nearly fifty years after Grapefruit first appeared, in July 2013, Ono published a sequel, Acorn, via OR Books.

  These two works set the template for much of what followed: art as proposition, art as shared act, the artist as host rather than sole author.

• 5. Bed-ins, Bagism, and Lennon

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  Ono first approached the Beatles not through Lennon but through Paul McCartney, visiting his London home to obtain a Lennon-McCartney manuscript for a book John Cage was working on. McCartney declined but suggested Lennon might oblige. Lennon later gave her the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word".

  At the Indica Gallery preview on the 7th of November 1966, Lennon climbed the ladder with the magnifying glass and read YES. He was also drawn to a piece called Hammer a Nail, which invited viewers to hammer a nail into a white-painted wooden board. The exhibition had not yet opened, and Ono stopped Lennon from using the pristine board. Gallery owner John Dunbar interceded: "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Lennon replied that he would give Ono an imaginary five shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail. In a 2002 interview, Ono said: "I was very attracted to him. It was a really strange situation."

  By May 1968, Lennon invited Ono to his home while his wife was abroad. They spent the night recording avant-garde tape loops. Those recordings became their first collaborative album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. Lennon wrote a reference to Ono into his song "Julia" during the Beatles' trip to India: "Ocean child calls me", a translation of her name. On the 20th of March 1969, Lennon and Ono married at the registry office in Gibraltar.

  Their honeymoon became a protest. They staged a week-long bed-in in Amsterdam, campaigning against the Vietnam War. A planned second bed-in in the United States was blocked when they were denied entry to the country. They held it instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Lennon later said he regretted crediting McCartney as co-writer on that first independent single instead of Ono, who had actually written it with him.

  The couple also invented "bagism", first introduced at a Vienna press conference, wearing a bag over their entire bodies to satirize prejudice and stereotyping. Lennon detailed that period in the Beatles song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". He changed his name by deed poll on the 22nd of April 1969, switching Winston for Ono as his middle name, becoming John Ono Lennon on official documents.

• 6. The Plastic Ono Band

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  Plastic Ono Band was first conceived by Ono in 1967 as an idea for an art exhibition in Berlin. It was physically realized in 1968 as a multimedia machine maquette by Lennon, a sound and light installation in the Apple press office consisting of four perspex columns, each representing a member of the Beatles.

  Lennon's first solo single, "Give Peace a Chance", released in July 1969, was the first record credited to the Plastic Ono Band. That December, the group's first album, Live Peace in Toronto 1969, appeared. It had been recorded live at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in September, with a lineup that included guitarist Eric Clapton, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White. Ono performed two original feedback-driven compositions in the second half of the set: "Don't Worry Kyoko" and "John John (Let's Hope for Peace)".

  Ono released her first solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, in 1970, as a companion piece to Lennon's own record. The two albums had paired covers: hers showed her leaning on Lennon, his showed Lennon leaning on her. Her album featured raw, harsh vocals bearing resemblance to sounds from nature and free jazz techniques. Performers included Ornette Coleman and Ringo Starr. The album reached No. 182 on the US charts. Music scholar Meredith Monk is among those who have cited Ono's use of screams and vocal noise as a direct influence.

  Her 1971 double album Fly explored psychedelic rock alongside Fluxus experiments. When Lennon was invited to play with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore West on the 5th of June 1971, Ono joined them. The track "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" on Fly, which featured Eric Clapton on guitar, was an ode to her daughter who had disappeared during a custody dispute when Cox took the then-eight-year-old child and raised her in an organization called the Church of the Living Word. Ono would not see Kyoko again until 1998.

• 7. December 8, 1980

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  In early 1980, Lennon heard the B-52's' "Rock Lobster" while on vacation in Bermuda. The song reminded him of Ono's musical sound, and he took it as a sign that she had reached the mainstream. The B-52's had in fact been influenced by Ono. The couple began trading songs over the phone, accumulating enough material to record an album structured as a dialogue between them.

  Double Fantasy was released on the 17th of November 1980 to tepid reviews. Critics focused on what they saw as an idealized portrait of domestic bliss. Three weeks later, on the evening of the 8th of December 1980, Lennon and Ono were at the Record Plant Studio working on her song "Walking on Thin Ice". When they returned to The Dakota, their Manhattan apartment building, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman, who had been stalking him for two months. Ono cradled the dying Lennon in her arms.

  "Walking on Thin Ice (For John)" was released as a single less than a month later, peaking at No. 58 and gaining significant underground airplay. Double Fantasy received an instant critical reappraisal and won Ono the Grammy Award for Album of the Year at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards in 1981. The album became a landmark of the decade.

  Ono funded the construction of the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, directly across from The Dakota. It was officially dedicated on the 9th of October 1985, which would have been Lennon's 45th birthday. In 1981 she released Season of Glass, whose cover photograph showed Lennon's bloodied spectacles next to a half-filled glass of water, with a window overlooking Central Park behind them. That photograph later sold at auction in London in April 2002 for about $13,000. In the liner notes, Ono explained the album was not dedicated to Lennon because "he would have been offended - he was one of us."

• 8. Artist in Her Own Right

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  In April 2003, Ono's Walking on Thin Ice (Remixes) reached number one on Billboard's Dance/Club Play chart, her first number one hit. She had dropped her first name and was performing as simply "ONO", a response to the "Oh, no!" jokes that had followed her throughout her career. The remix project featured top DJs including Pet Shop Boys, Orange Factory, Peter Rauhofer, and Danny Tenaglia.

  By June 2009, at age 76, Ono scored her fifth number one on the Dance/Club Play chart. By 2013, the then-eighty-year-old had beaten Katy Perry, Robin Thicke, and Lady Gaga on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play Charts with the singles "Hold Me" and "Walking on Thin Ice". In 2014, "Angel" became her twelfth number one on the US Dance chart. In December 2016, Billboard magazine named her the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time.

  Her Wish Tree project, begun in 1996, asks visitors to write a wish on paper, fold it, and tie it around the branch of a tree native to the installation site. The Wish Tree installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was established in July 2010. Wishes placed on Wish Trees in exhibitions around the world are periodically sent to the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Iceland, which was lit for the first time on the 9th of October 2007, the date of Lennon's birth. Each year between October 9 and December 8, the tower projects a vertical beam of light into the sky.

  The 2001 retrospective Y E S YOKO ONO, which traveled to thirteen museums across the United States, Canada, Japan, and Korea, received the International Association of Art Critics USA Award for Best Museum Show Originating in New York City. In 2024, the Tate Modern organized a retrospective titled Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, which is scheduled to travel to The Broad in Los Angeles for Ono's first solo exhibition in Southern California, opening on the 23rd of May 2026.