How Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree installation in Los Angeles is helping people voice their hopes
Wish Trees for Los Angeles invites people to jot down their hopes on paper tags and tie them to the trees, drawing as many as 800 a day
A wish is a deeply personal thing, often fleeting and silent. But sometimes, a wish is a collective endeavour, a bold and communal call for action.
Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree installation is both. The piece – which Ono has staged more than 250 times in more than 35 countries – draws on a Japanese tradition that invites visitors at Buddhist temples to scribble their hopes and dreams onto paper tags and tie them to the branches of a tree. The wishes are left dangling amid the tree leaves, like budding fruit.
Ono’s very first Wish Tree – a young grapefruit tree planted in a wooden box – was shown in 1996 as part of her solo show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, a gallery in the Bergamot Station art centre in Santa Monica, California. After the exhibition closed, the gallery planted the tree on its property.
It was so meaningful to Shoshana Wayne that when her gallery moved to Los Angeles’ West Adams neighbourhood in 2018, she replanted the tree in her own backyard in Pacific Palisades. It was destroyed in last year’s wildfire.
Now, 30 years after its debut, a grove of Wish Trees is in bloom at The Broad museum in Los Angeles.
They appear to be much needed right now, given the voracious response from the public. The installation, Wish Trees for Los Angeles, is part of Ono’s solo exhibition, “Music of the Mind”.