Three Wishes by Ken and Julia Yonetani, 2014

This work consists of a glass figurine, a butterfly specimen, a glass dome and a music box measuring 15 centimetres high by 9 centimetres wide on a white plinth measuring 40 centimetres wide, 40 centimetres deep and 110 centimetres high, set against a dark blue wall.

Central to the work is a figurine standing in a frosted glass flower that has been placed in the middle of a mirrored circular base. A bell domed jar houses the figurine. It is made of glass and is able to be seen through clearly. The figurine is made of transparent glass and is approximately 8 centimetres in height. Attached to the figurine’s back is a dried butterfly specimen, complete with abdomen, antennae and open wings characterising the figurine as a fairy and providing a distinction between the reflective surface of the glass figurine and the natural quality of a real butterfly specimen. The butterfly wings are delicate and fragile and are coloured a dusty pale blue. As the figurine turns, the music of It’s a Small World, a song Walt Disney commissioned for the 1964 New York World Fair ‘Children of the World’ pavilion, plays in the background. The lighting changes in colour from blue to purple to pink and green and back again, refracting and bouncing off the glass enclosure, as the fairy twirls, captured in its confined space.

The title of the work, Three Wishes, is drawn from the Walt Disney story, Our Friend the Atom from 1956, which promoted the technology of nuclear fission as an ‘atomic Genie’ who has granted the human race three wishes: the wish for an endless source of energy, the wish for a magic tool that can promote food and health for humankind, and the wish for peace.

Close to sixty years later, Ken and Julia Yonetani worked closely with scientists led by Professor Otaki Joji at the University of Ryukyus, in Okinawa to produce Three Wishes. Here the fairy takes on the role of granting wishes, complete with wings that are those of a real butterfly, Zizeeria maha (Pale Grass Blue Butterfly), a common butterfly found in Japan. The artists raised these lycaenid butterflies together with the scientists from Otaki’s laboratory, from eggs of specimens that were collected as part of an ongoing scientific study into the biological impact of the Fukushima nuclear power disaster. Professor Otaki’s laboratory has found that the Zizeeria maha specimens collected in the area adjacent the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were impacted by various levels of radiation exposure, in the form of mutations and higher mortality rates. Here, the artists pose the same provocation asked by the narrator in the Walt Disney story, Our Friend the Atom: with the climate crisis happening now, what would we wish for? What do we and the world need most now?