河原温

Kawara On’s career is clearly demarcated into two periods: his time in Tokyo, from 1951, the year he relocated there, until 1959 when he departed Japan, and the years thereafter. Born in Aichi Prefecture, Kawara graduated from Aichi Prefectural Kariya High School in 1951 and then moved to Tokyo. There, he studied painting on his own and developed his own unique style at a remarkably early age, while interacting with many emerging artists and critics. He frequently showed his works, including in public open-call exhibitions such as the “Andepandan” (Independent) Exhibitions (of which there were two, one organized by Nihon Bijutsukai [the Japan Art Association] and the other by the Yomiuri Shimbun), group shows such as the Nippon Exhibition and the Demokrato Art Exhibition, and several solo shows at venues including the Takemiya Gallery. He also participated in roundtable discussions and wrote magazine articles, emerging as a key figure among the new generation of postwar artists. Until around 1956, Kawara’s notable works included two series of drawings, “Bathroom” (1953–1954) and “Events in a Warehouse” (1954) (both in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), as well as the oil paintings “Pregnant Woman” (1954, same collection) and “Black Soldier” (1955, collection of the Ohara Museum of Art, Okayama). These works are characterized by irregular polygonal pictorial spaces and the use of strongly emphasized perspective to construct claustrophobic spaces where surreal, science-fictional scenes played out, with human figures and body parts evoking robots, mannequins, or dolls. They vividly convey still-fresh memories of wartime with an absurd, brutal, yet humorous tone, and the critic Nakahara Yusuke termed them “misshitsu no kaiga” (“locked-room paintings”) (“Bijutsu hihyō,” June 1956). In the late 1950s, Kawara began producing “Printed Paintings” with the goal of reaching a wider audience. These works were made using offset printing, with the artist actively involved in the plate-making and printing processes. In addition to several Printed Paintings, works from this period include a series of drawings titled “Thanatophanies” (1955–1956), which likely served as the basis for the Printed Paintings. After leaving Japan in September 1959, Kawara spent several years in Mexico before traveling to New York and Paris, eventually settling in New York in the autumn of 1964. His known works from these years include approximately 200 drawings (mostly plan drawings) made in Paris and New York in 1964, paintings featuring numbers and letters on a monochromatic ground made in 1965, and works incorporating code. Then, in January 1966, he embarked on the “Today” series, commonly known as the Date Paintings, which was to be his magnum opus. At first sight, the Date Paintings may appear at first glance like simply plates with only a date printed in the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals on a monochromatic background. However, they were meticulously crafted by hand according to a set of strict rules. The most crucial rule was that each painting had to be executed from start to finish on the date it showed. If a Date Painting could not be finished on the same day it was started, Kawara discarded it. Dates were written in white, in the Roman alphabet and in the language most commonly spoken in the place where the painting was produced, and if there was no Roman-alphabet language, he used Esperanto. The simple, sans-serif font is almost identical across all paintings. The relatively thick canvases come in eight sizes, ranging from 8 x 10 inches (approx. 20 x 25 cm) to 61 x 89 inches (approx. 155 x 227 cm). Kawara used acrylic paint, and while there were only three background colors — red, blue, and black — the “black” which was most frequently used is actually a very dark gray made by mixing several colors of paint anew each time, resulting in various tints such as navy blue, deep green, and dark brown that are visible on close examination. The sides of the canvases are all painted the same color, giving each painting the appearance of a solid plaque-like object. The paintings were stored in cardboard boxes handmade by the artist, often with a section of that day’s local newspaper from the place of production pasted inside. One noteworthy aspect of the paintings is that the dates themselves have no particular significance. While Kawara made the decision each time to produce a painting on a given day, the individual dates do not inherently possess any historical, social, or personal importance. What the Date Paintings represent is merely the artist’s act of painting on that particular day, in what could be called a proof of his existence. Kawara On produced nearly 3,000 Date Paintings over 48 years until 2013, the year before his death, which collectively form a cohesive body of work. In the late 1960s, Kawara also initiated a series of autobiographical works closely tied to the Date Paintings. “I Read” (1966–1995) is a scrapbook of clippings from newspapers he read each day. “I Got Up” (1968–1979) is a mail art project consisting of postcards with “I got up at…” and the exact time he arose spelled out using rubber stamps, which he sent to friends daily. “I Met” (1968–1979) documents the people Kawara met and conversed on a given day, while “I Went” (1968–1979) indicates the routes he took on a day with red lines on photocopied maps, each stored in files. These works can be seen as derivations of the Date Paintings. “I Am Still Alive” (1970–2000) involved sending telegrams reading said phrase, in English, to various people including friends and art-world associates. The piece shows that the aforementioned “proof of his existence” was essentially “proof of life.” While the telegram’s message was certainly true at the moment the artist dispatched it, its receipt by the addressee in another location implies the artist’s absence, and the inclusion of the word “Still” hints at the constant uncertainty of life. “One Million Years” is a set of two series of ten bound volumes, with each page containing 500 years in the Western calendar, typed out in order. Each volume contains 200 pages, and in total they cover a million years. The first set, “Past,” was produced in 1970 and 1971, while “Future” was produced between 1980 and 1998. A span of a million years brings us into a cosmic timescale that transcends human history, implicitly pointing to the emergence and extinction of our species. However, the start and end points for “Past” and “Future” are the years he executed the individual sets and are within the artist’s own lifetime, thereby introducing the artist’s presence / absence and life / death into the narrative. Kawara devised two projects that could continue even after his death. The “One Million Years” reading project (launched in 1993) involves reading aloud, live or as a recording, parts of the work at exhibition venues and other public sites, and limited-edition CDs of the reading have also been released. “Pure Consciousness” (initiated in 1998) involves exhibiting Date Paintings at kindergartens for a certain period, giving children a “pure” experience of the works before socialization influences their perceptions. Kawara’s oeuvre, with the Date Paintings at its core, are often discussed in the context of conceptual art due to his use of text and numbers. However, his practice took on an extraordinarily original form that intuitively links the personal and the universal, the everyday and the cosmic, by literally defining and marking each day with its unique date, occurrences, and the cycle of sleeping and waking. This meditative body of work has been enthusiastically praised worldwide, and exerts significant, enduring impact as a pivotal reference point in contemporary art. (Minami Yusuke / Translated by Christopher Stephens) ( Published online: 2024-12-20)