Make Waves, Not War.(Yoko Ono art exhibition)(Critical Essay)

When Yoko Ono was pursuing avant-garde art in New York in the early 1960s, even Western art critics puzzled over her out-there conceptual art. For Asians, who expected women to be chaste and obedient, Ono's strange, brash--sometimes obscene--works were completely alien. No longer. Four decades on, Asia seems ready to embrace the Japanese-born Ono as more than just John Lennon's wife. Last month "Yes Yoko Ono," a 125-piece show of the artist's drawings, sculptures, objects, films and photos of performance art, kicked off an ambitious two-year Asian tour in Seoul. "As an Asian woman, Yoko Ono was too much ahead of her time," says Yoon Sung Hee, a college student studying Ono's abstract works at the Samsung Museum of Modern Art. "But now we begin to understand what she was trying to say."

Ono's most obvious message has always been peace and positive thinking. That was what first drew Lennon to her when they met back in 1966 during an exhibition of her work in London. The Beatle was fascinated by her "Ceiling Painting," which consisted of a ladder leading up to a framed paper on the ceiling bearing the tiny word "YES." "As if to deny her name, O-No, she shouted 'yes' so many times," says Hong Ra Young, deputy director of the museum, which is cosponsoring the exhibit in South Korea along with New York's Japan Society. " 'Yes' to peace, 'yes' to hope and 'yes' to life." One highlight of the exhibit is "Play It by Trust," made up of a huge monochromatic game board and pieces, causing players to lose track of their positions and hence eliminate all competition.

As an artist Ono is playful and quite fond of rule-breaking. A photo of her 1964 performance "Cut Piece" shows her inviting audience members onstage to cut her clothing with scissors. According to the exhibition's catalog, the performance is meant to symbolize the reciprocal relationship between exhibitionism and desire, victim and assailant, sadist and masochist. "A Box of Smile" (1967) consists of nothing more than a small metal box with a mirror at the bottom to reflect the viewer's smile. Her "Three Spoons" (1967) shows four silver spoons, while "Four Spoons" (1968) displays three bronze spoons. The ...