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M+, Hong Kong, © Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono 小野洋子
Confessions in Black 黑色告白
2014
Confessions in Black is one of the few works created by Yoko Ono using pigment on canvas. What appears to be a monochrome painting of a vast expanse of black at first glance, is in fact a highly gestural, mixed-media work completed with sumi ink, oil, watercolour, acrylic, and permanent marker. First, Ono covered the canvas with black sumi ink as a method to channel her sadness, then, she moved to hide her exposed grief using a combination of media in the same colour. Like many of her works, the painting is a manifestation of Ono’s emotions and thoughts, as she wrote of it with lyrical simplicity and directness: ‘What I was doing was to express my extreme sorrow and making sure it was hidden at the same time. It was done on canvas but it was not a painting. It was an exposure of my sorrow hidden in black…As the work is passed from one to another, in person and/or in location, sorrow ceased to be sorrow and becomes truth, of clear power.’ Reverting to Ono’s early conceptual austerity, Confessions in Black echoes the artist’s instruction pieces, event scores, and performances created in the 1960s.
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