Ocean Child: I Am Yoko

Yuka Honda

Yuka Honda (eucademix) is a composer, producer, and sonic innovator whose work defies genre and convention. Co-founder of the trailblazing duo Cibo Matto, she has since forged a solo path that blends electronic experimentation, improvisational depth, infectious rhythm, and abstract storytelling. She describes her music as quantum, continuum, and sensory—a fluid exploration of sound as both narrative and experience. Like a book or a film, her compositions invite the listener into a story: shifting through contrasting emotions, spaces, and textures to create an unfolding journey. Her work was shaped by the sound of hip hop—where sampling, layering, and cross-genre collage redefined music—as well as by experimental production, microtonal detail, and the interplay between digital and live instrumentation. Honda has collaborated with artists including Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Nels Cline, Photay, Jason Lindner (Black Star), Dave Harrington (Darkside), L’Rain, and Martha Wainwright, and her recent projects span multimedia opera, museum performance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Highlights include Respira, a duo with Butoh dancer Azumi O E at ISSUE Project Room, and her score for Karon Davis’s “Resurrection of Osiris” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Living in upstate New York, Honda draws inspiration from radical farming movements and her deep engagement with community, merging art, ecology, and philosophy into a singular sonic vision. Yuka Honda is a board member of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to food sovereignty and regenerative agriculture. Her works Farm Psychedelia I and Farm Psychedelia II honor the radical farmers of upstate New York who are innovating solutions to food insecurity, further bridging her artistic practice with her commitment to community and environmental stewardship.

Photo by Sean Ono Lennon

Glenn Kaino

Glenn Kaino was born in 1972 in Los Angeles. Kaino’s works, often functioning as poetic contradictions, aim to reconcile conflicting ideologies, opposing systems, and strict dichotomies in material and experiential ways.

Conceiving his practice as conceptual kitbashing, akin to a model maker’s way of appropriating readymade kits to assemble unique models, Kaino reconfigures the conditions of distinct cultural spheres into ecologies of making in which seemingly disparate materials and ideas are brought into contact.

His studio practice includes sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance, installation, and large-scale public work. He also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture—ranging from tech to music to political organizing.

Major solo exhibitions of Kaino’s work have been presented at the High Museum of Art; the San Jose Museum of Art; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Andy Warhol Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Artpace San Antonio, and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Kaino’s work has been featured in Desert X, the 13th International Cairo Biennale, the 12th Biennale de Lyon, Performa (2009), the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and Prospect.3, New Orleans. Kaino’s work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Kaino is also an Emmy and Webby Award-winning producer and documentarian, whose films have been featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW.

Photo by Nogen Beck

Theo Bleckmann

Theo Bleckmann is a Grammy nominated singer and new music composer whose approach blurs boundaries and surprises expectations. Bleckmann re-imagines songs by Henry Purcell, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Kurt Weil, Kate Bush, Massive Attack and the Bee Gees. He’s appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is the recipient of the Jazz Echo award, and has toured Europe with Oulu Symphony Orchestra and UMO Jazz Big Band and Japan with Century Symphony Orchestra. Bleckmann is also recognized for his original work and has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Hollenbeck, Ulysses Owens, John Zorn, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and more. 

Photo by Raoul Manuel Schnell

Alex Cline

A native of Los Angeles, drummer-percussionist-composer Alex Cline has been a mainstay on the creative music scene in that city for fifty years while his reputation as a musician has been international in magnitude. Known for his contributions to the music of countless important and influential artists in the creative jazz and new music worlds, including his twin brother Nels Cline, he has also worked for many years as a bandleader-composer, having released eight albums under his own name as well as many more from collaborative improvisational projects. In the dance world, Cline’s music has been heard with Oguri/Roxanne Steinberg/Lightning Shadow, Margaret Schuette, the Momentum Company, and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, among others. He was a member of Will Salmon’s multimedia performance company Open Gate Theatre for forty years and curated its monthly series of adventurous music for twenty-two years. Outside of his music-related pursuits, Alex worked at the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research before retiring after thirty-two years there, and, as a student of the late Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, he is a lay dharma teacher in the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. 

Photo by Ernestine Lona

Nels Cline

Nels Cline is a genre-defying guitarist widely celebrated as a longtime member of seminal rock band Wilco, and for his expansive solo career spanning jazz, rock, and experimental music. As a band leader he’s released three critically acclaimed albums on Blue Note Records, from the lush orchestration of Lovers to the electrified improvisations of Share the Wealth. His latest project, Consentrik Quartet, showcases his deep roots in the avant-garde improvised-music scene, further cementing his reputation as one of today’s most adventurous and versatile guitarists. 

Photo by Nathan West

Rila Fukushima

Rila Fukushima is a Japanese actress and model known for her work in Japan and internationally. She made her acting debut in “The Wolverine: SAMURAI” (2013) as Yukio and later appeared in “Game of Thrones,” “Arrow,” “Ghost in the Shell,” and “Annette.” She has also worked extensively in fashion and continues to pursue diverse roles in film and television. 

Photo courtesy of the artist

Emi Helfrich

Emi Helfrich is a New York based multimedia artist whose work is rooted in international cultural identity and radical hope. She is excited to celebrate the legacy of Yoko Ono, an artist who has deeply influenced her as both an activist and an artist. Emi believes that hope is not in opposition to grief; they are part of the same truth. Even after the bombing of Hiroshima, flowers were growing in the rubble only a year later. These cycles of loss and rebirth are at the core of her creative vision. From 2019 to 2020, she lived in Tokyo, seeking to strengthen her connection with her Japanese family. Her experience continues to inform her work, which channels the fantastical to examine resilience and the transformative power of love. 

Photo by sophie lair-berreby

Devra Hoff

Devra Hoff (she/her) is a bassist, composer, and arranger who has worked in a wide array of cultural contexts and musical settings. She has recorded and toured extensively over three decades, playing on over one hundred recordings and thousands of shows with artists such as Julia Holter, Yoko Ono, Sharon Van Etten/Attachment Theory, Sean Ono Lennon, Nels Cline/Singers, Vijay Iyer, Cibo Matto, Mike Watt, Faye Carol, and many more. She has performed legendary venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, The Hollywood Bowl, and Sydney Opera House, and at several major international festivals including Glastonbury (UK), Primavera (Spain/Portugal), Summer Sonic (Tokyo), Lallapalooza (US), Berlin Jazz Fest, etc. Devra's own records include Solo Bass (named by avant-pop icon Laurie Anderson as one of her top 5 favorite records of all time), Voices From the Empty Moor: Song of Anne Briggs) (Kill Rock Stars) Mendoza/Hoff Revels’ punk/jazz debut Echolocation, (Aum Fidelity) which was featured in top 10 jazz records of the year by both NPR and The New York Times) and most recently the electronic/ambient solo album Solve/Coagula (Switch Hit). Her compositions and arrangements have also served stage, dance, and film.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Jason Lindner

Jason Lindner, aka flymyspcshp, is a contemporary electronic musician and keyboardist from Brooklyn, NY, widely known for his post-jazz, IDM-influenced group, Now Vs Now, and for his unique keyboard and synth work on David Bowie’s final Grammy-winning album ‘★’ (blak-stär), for which producer Tony Visconti called Jason a “Godsend.” With an artistic identity spanning genres, cultures, formats, and technologies, Jason is a frequent performer and collaborator in the underground experimental electronic and DJ communities, actively exploring cross-sections of live electronic music and spontaneous improvisation for immersive sonic journeys both on and off the dance floor, playing everything from raves to meditative wellness sessions, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with a growing list of luminaries. These included active collaborations including Currency Audio, Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto), Mulatu Astatke, Saha Gnawa, Nikki Nair, Toribio, JKriv, Greg Paulus (No Regular Play), Salami Rose Joe Louis, LNDFK, Tatyana, ExoTech (Kimbra, Sophia Brous), Nu Jazz, No Eyes, Hybrid Movement Company, Sidra Bell, Poncili Creacion, Lauryn Hill, Meshell Ndegeocello, Angelique Kidjo, Danny Elfman. The late groundbreaking synthesizer designer and MIDI pioneer, Dave Smith, wrote that Jason “brings a fearless sense of improvisation to not only rhythm, melody, and harmony, but also to sound." 

Photo by Justin Lane

Maggie Parkins

Cellist Maggie Parkins is equally at home in chamber music, orchestral music, and the avant-garde. A robust advocate for new and experimental music, Parkins with the Eclipse String Quartet and Brightwork new music ensemble has commissioned or premiered numerous works by composers from all over the world. Parkins is also a member of Mojave Trio and The Smudges with Jeff Gauthier. She has performed with groups including Jazz Passengers, Billy Childs, and the Anthony Braxton Ensemble. Parkins’ recordings can be heard on the Bridge, Albany, Tzadik, Avan, Cryptogramophone, and Victo labels. Parkins has performed Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Banff Centre, Festival Internacional de Musica de Cadaques (Spain), Heidelberg Castle Festival, Spoleto (USA and Italy), the Taktlos Festival (Switzerland), and the Bach Aria Festival in New York. Parkins taught cello and chamber music at UC Irvine for 19 years and currently teaches cello at Pomona College and Cal Arts. 

Photo courtesy of the artist

Macie Stewart

Macie Stewart is a musician and multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. A trained pianist and violinist, Stewart began to explore the world musically before she could talk. She utilizes this innate knowledge to inform her self-taught technique in guitar, voice, and composition, resulting in a uniquely rich and deeply humanist approach to her work. Stewart’s experience as an improviser leads her to see composition and songwriting as a conversation between herself and the environment around her, searching for a deeper connection amongst all facets of life. She is known as half of the duo, Finom, as well as for her solo and trio work under her own name. Macie has been featured in Pitchfork, The Wire, NPR, Rolling Stone, and Downbeat Magazine. She has presented performances and sound work at Experimental Sound Studio, The Renaissance Society, The MCA, Stora Galleriet at SKF/Konstnärshuset, and The Mattress Factory. Stewart has also toured extensively as a multi-instrumentalist with Jeff Tweedy, Japanese Breakfast, Ken Vandermark, Kevin Morby, and The Weather Station. Photo by Anna Powell Denton

Tōth

Brooklyn-based songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Tōth (Alex Toth of Rubblebucket) creates performances that blur the line between concert, ritual, and communal gathering. Through emotionally resonant songwriting, soulful guitar, piano and trumpet playing, and an inviting stage presence, he cultivates spaces for connection, vulnerability, and play. His latest album, And The Voice Said, co-produced by Grammy-nominated artist Caroline Rose and featuring Kimbra, reflects an artist expanding the possibilities of song as a shared experience—an approach that resonates with the participatory spirit of Yoko Ono's work. 

Photo by Michael Leviton