Mend Piece is guided by a set of deceptively simple instructions: “Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time.” No further explanation is given. The only source of guidance is conversation with other people in the room and efforts by recent visitors collected on a shelf. As might be expected, given the materials offered by Ono, the results are beguilingly eclectic and completely inadequate from a practical standpoint.

Ono’s legacy as a pioneer of avant-gardist art was something others noticed about her early on. She knew that she was an outsider and that her tastes were ‘different’, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War ended that it became something she embraced “aggressively”. After completing university as the first woman to ever enter the philosophy program at Gakushuin University, Ono moved to New York City. Both inspired Ono’s sound to the point where she unknowingly became avant-gardist in her approach, with her school teacher telling her just that: “He said, ‘Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do, and they’re called avant-garde’,” Ono recalled.

Acommodious floorplan imbues the organic forms in Faurschou New York’s latest show, “Embrace the World from Within” (from April 1 through September 17, 2023), with a sense of harmony and potential. The exhibition shows also the Yoko Ono’s work “Ex It”, a meditation on transience and traces titled “We’re All Water” (2006/2015). This work is composed of 118 palm-sized jars of water arranged side by side on a long white shelf. The jars are filled with water and labeled with names like Simone de Beauvoir (rendered in Chinese characters as 西蒙·德·波伏娃), Samuel Beckett (塞缪尔·贝克特), and Ono’s own (小野洋子).