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Wish Tree is an ongoing art installation series by Japanese artist Yoko Ono, started sometime after 1981, in which a tree native to a site is planted under her direction. Viewers are usually invited to tie a written wish to the tree except during the winter months when a tree can be more vulnerable. Locations of the piece have included New York City, St. Louis, Wish Tree for Washington, DC, San Francisco, Pasadena, and Palo Alto, California, Tokyo, Venice, Paris, Dublin, London, Exeter, England, Finland and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Her 1996 Wish Piece had the following instructions:
Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes.
Installations have involved from one to 21 trees, and varieties include lemon trees, eucalyptus, and crepe myrtles. To honor wish writers' privacy, Ono claims she does not read the wishes, and collects them all to be buried at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay in Iceland. To date over 1 million wishes have been buried beneath the tower.
History
The series developed after an installation of one tree in Finland grew into a mini-forest, and Ono felt a continuing social need. She has also said:
As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar.
In fall 2010, Ono performed Voice Piece for Soprano, near the MoMA rendition of the piece as part of the museum's collections show. Musician Pharrell Williams wrote on one in New York in 2013.