Wish Tree (Yoko Ono art series)

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, Calgary.

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.

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.