Tokyo, London, New York: Yoko Ono’s Art and Transnational Utopia

• In Event: Public Hopes, Private Dreams: Utopic Visions in Modern Japan

Abstract

John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a press conference on April 1, 1973 to declare their allegiance to a new country named 'Nutopia'. Their claim of citizenship of this fictional nation occurred amid the Department of Immigration's ongoing attempts to deport Lennon due to subversive political activities. While this declaration was mostly seen as a good humoured protest against these proceedings, Nutopia also expressed the start of Lennon and Ono's political and social idealism, later expressed in the song 'Imagine'. Ono's work is most strongly associated with the former Beatle's work, but there has been a revitalised interest in her own art as shown by major retrospectives in Sydney (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013-14) and New York (MoMA, 2015). Drawing on her enduring art pieces and her 1974 Bungei Shunju essay “Waga ai, waga tōsō (My Love, My Struggle)”, I explore Ono's transnational utopian principles as they developed over her career as a resident of Japan, England and America, raising still relevant questions about gender, race, war, and environmentalism.

Author

• Carolyn Srevens, Monash University