Yoko Ono is no longer misunderstood

Yoko Ono says her work is like the Sydney Opera House: once misunderstood, but eventually accepted. Source: AAP

YOKO Ono says her work is a bit like the Sydney Opera House: once misunderstood, but eventually accepted.

The same could be said for the avant-garde artist and widow of John Lennon herself.

The woman who for years was blamed for breaking up the Beatles has come to terms with people, well, not liking her work very much.

Speaking at the War Is Over! (if you want it) exhibition's media launch on Thursday at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Ono said she often had often come up with ideas she thought were brilliant, only to confront the criticism of others.

"They thought, 'What is she doing?'," she told reporters.

In that respect, Ono compared her work to another, once polarising artwork: the Sydney Opera House.

"Because most people don't understand it and they attack it, but one day they might go, 'Oh, it's not so bad'."

Ono said she had never been concerned about what people think of her, or her work.

"I don't at all think, 'Will I fit or not?'" she said.

"There is so much to art that (artists) don't have to be concerned about how people think about it."

As she approaches her 81st birthday, Ono shows no signs of stopping. Her first major Australian exhibition opens on Friday at the MCA. Ono posed for photographs with a backdrop of the Opera House, wearing her signature sunglasses and a white hat that echoes Utzon's sails.

The works in the exhibition showcase everything the eccentric artist, activist and musician is about and represent the culmination of five decades of her artistic pursuits.

With War Is Over, Ono wants to give up the right of judgment - in true postmodernist style - to the visitor: you make the meaning.

There are eight "participatory" works in which Ono invites people to immerse themselves.

The most hyped is called Play It By Trust. Visitors play a game of chess with only white pieces, the eventual confusion of whose-piece-is-where leading to a sense of "peace" between players, as competitiveness founders.

Another is Wish Tree For Sydney, which allows visitors to write private messages of hope and peace in letters tied to eucalyptus saplings.

But potentially the most popular piece is My Mommy Is Beautiful, a poignant work that invites people to write Post-it messages of love and thanks or anger and sadness, to their mothers, and attach them to a wall.

"It was inspired by my mother," Ono explained.

"I could not say anything to her now. I wanted to say, 'I'm sorry I didn't understand what you were going through'."

Ono says there's a very important reason for the exhibition's title - because it's up to us if we want to create change.

"Recently, I said, 'By 2050 we will create a heaven on earth'."

"Somebody asked me...'How?'"

"Well, by us doing it, not asking anyone else. We have to do it," Ono explained.

"This show is like the beginning of that - for you to work in certain physical creativity."

That's a lot of pressure, Sydney.

* The War is Over! (if you want it): Yoko Ono exhibition opens at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday.

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