Indian visit will be a great learning experience: Yoko Ono

International artist, singer and the wife of the late Beatles legend John Lennon, Yoko Ono is on a ten-day visit to India and she hopes to learn a lot during this trip.

The reason for Yoko Ono’s Indian visit is her exhibition titled 'Our Beautiful Daughters' which is a series of public art projects spread over 20 venues including schools and hospitals in Delhi. She will also perform at a show titled ‘To India with Love’.

“I did not bring anything to India apart from myself. This visit will be a great learning experience... This beautiful very very grand land will teach me,” said Ono in Delhi on Thursday, a day before the unveiling of her first ever exhibition in the country at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi.

Yoko Ono added that she hoped to learn from Indian women. “I am very happy to be here... It is fantastic that India has already woken up already to women in the art field... I have to learn a lot from them about what is happening in India,” she said.

Talking about her project here Yoko Ono told reporters: “Women have a unique nurturing quality... the men however feel that they can express power best in politics, legalese, creating war....the struggle for world peace and struggle for women power is parallel now... When we create a society of freedom, justice and peace we will have world peace."

“The art work is definitely inspired by emotion... and an incredible respect for Indian women,” said the artist whose career has been filled with work encompassing performance, film, music and writing that challenges people's understanding of art and the world around them.

Yoko Ono said John Lennon and she had visited the camp of Sai Baba near Mumbai during their first visit together to India. The artist had married the Beatles singer in 1969.

“We had been in Bombay for a couple of nights and gone on all the way to the mountains to the camp of Sai Baba. it was an incredible experience....We felt it was important to sit in his lecture and John insisted that we sit together despite women and men not being permitted to sit together,” recollected Ono.

During her India trip Ono is also exhibiting her 'Wish Tree' that has played a significant part in many of her exhibitions since the 1990s.Under this project people are invited to write their wishes on paper and hang it on a tree, a sort of collective prayer.

“Wish Tree is a very Japanese.. when I began to do it I became very humble... also I didn't want to do it in the traditional way and wanted it to be very Yoko Ono way.

“Wish Tree is my hit song if you can call it that way. When I first did in Los Angeles there was not much response. But in Spain it generated a fantastic response. It was incredible and there were more and more wish trees,” said Ono who said she already tagged her wish at the tree in Delhi.