Garden of the Phoenix & Yoko Ono's Sky Landing

The story

When the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition took over Jackson Park, Japan gifted Chicago the Hō-ō-den—a wooden pavilion modeled after the 11th-century Byōdō-in temple in Uji. While the fair's temporary plaster palaces were torn down or burned shortly after the gates closed, this structure remained on Wooded Island for over half a century as a rare survivor. That ended in 1946, when anti-Japanese arson destroyed the pavilion, leaving the footprint charred and the island largely neglected for decades.

The ground lay quiet until a multi-decade restoration brought back the surrounding Japanese garden, which was officially renamed the Garden of the Phoenix in 2013. In October 2016, Yoko Ono unveiled Sky Landing directly on the burned site of the lost pavilion. Her first permanent public artwork in the Americas consists of twelve 12-foot-tall curved steel lotus petals anchored in low earth mounds shaped into yin and yang symbols—a spatial intervention intended to physically cool and mend the land. A companion 13th piece, Mended Petal, sits indoors at the Art Institute of Chicago.

You didn't hear it from us, but standing inside the ring of lotus petals feels less like a standard park visit and more like stumbling into an unadvertised memorial to lost diplomacy. Framed by over 120 cherry trees along the lagoon and the massive stone back wall of the Museum of Science and Industry across the water, the island condenses 19th-century World's Fair ambition, mid-century destruction, and modern conceptual art into one hidden clearing.