In today’s world, people routinely chronicle their lives though images, texts and videos in cyberspace without a second thought.
But the late Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara turned such daily repetitive acts into serial works of art to profoundly reflect on the meaning of time and our existence in this world.
What’s more, he did this long before the dawn of the digital world, using postcards, telegrams, calendars and CDs to painstakingly mark his presence and connect with people.
These works, now on show at an exhibition in Tai Kwun titled On Kawara: Rules of Freedom, Freedom of Rules, is the first solo presentation of Kawara’s work since his passing in 2014.
Covering five decades of his art, it includes paintings of dates (Today series or Date Paintings), postcards (I Got Up), telegrams (I Am Still Alive), binders filled with documents of people he met (I Met) and places visited (I Went), and his most iconic work that lists the years from the distant past to the faraway future (One Million Years).
There is also a dedicated section featuring Kawara’s works during his visit to Hong Kong in December 1978 – Date Paintings featuring Sing Tao Daily and The Hong Kong Standard (as our newspaper was then known), I Got Up and I Went postcards, as well as photos of him at the Mandarin Oriental, where he stayed.
Born on December 24, 1932, Kawara spent his life dedicated to examining time and existence through art. Part of the postwar avant-garde movement, he emigrated from Japan and settled in United States in 1964.
The Date Paintings have nothing but a date of no particular relevance, and can be seen as his proof of his existence on that day and the inevitable passage of time. Over 47 years, he made nearly 3,000 of them, placed in boxes and alongside a cutting from a newspaper.
Beginning with three cryptic messages in 1969 – from “I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DON’T WORRY” to “I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE WORRY” to “I AM GOING TO SLEEP FORGET IT – the Telegram series evolved into the profound I Am Still Alive series.
Over three decades, Kawara sent over 900 such telegrams worldwide, expressing both the magnitude of time and the significance of individual moments.
The I Got Up series comprises the two postcards Kawara sent friends and colleagues each day for nearly 12 years, stamping the time he arose that day along with the addresses of both sender and recipient. Through this, he transformed mundane postcard into a meditation on time.
One Million Years is set of 24 works, 12 spanning past millennia and 12 spanning future ones. Each work is made up of 10 leather binders, each of which contains 200 pages of typed numbers, one year after the other. Through a meticulous cut-and-paste method, Kawara documented one million years into the past and one million into the future. The decade from 1970 to 1980 remains blank, creating a void between past and future.
All the works on show are on loan from private collectors and museums, including the One Million Years Foundation.
The exhibition is free and is open from 11am to 7pm until Sunday at Tai Kwun.
Veronica Hu
