Wish Tree Garden

What is your greatest wish? Share your dreams and participate in the Japanese-born artist Yoko Ono’s art installation Wish Tree Garden. The installation has been created specifically for Copenhagen Contemporary and will be a permanent feature of the harbour area in front of the halls until December 2017.

Since the 1980s Yoko Ono has been creating the artwork Wish Tree, which consists of one or more trees planted all around the world. The work is site-specific; that is, each tree species is adapted to the place and its climate in collaboration with Ono. 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. In Wish Tree Garden on Papirøen, trees from the Danish landscape grow on the Copenhagen quayside, where they do not normally belong. Lilac, Reed Gråsten apple, japanese dogwood, birch and beech all create the impression of a garden you can walk in and see them blossoming, changing colour and losing their leaves in the course of the changing seasons. The slips of paper on the branches of the trees flutter in the wind, and all the individual wishes give the garden a poetic dimension.

All the wishes are regularly collected and when the exhibition ends they will be 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 will be buried around the Peace Tower along with the million other wishes that have already been collected since 1996 from other places in the world.