When the Guggenheim put on a retrospective of artist On Kawara's work in 2015, it was to be his last solo exhibition—at the request of the artist himself—at least for another 10 years. This self-imposed rule, that Ying Kwok, senior curator at Tai Kwun Contemporary, reveals in conversation with STIR about a current showcase of Kawara’s art on view at the Hong Kong-based institute, feels emblematic of the conceptual artist’s approach to his practice. It underscores the seemingly absurd constraints he put on himself and the obsession with the cyclical, relentless march of time that defines the artist’s oeuvre. The show at Tai Kwun, On Kawara: Rules of Freedom, Freedom of Rules, on view till August 17, 2025, foregrounds Kawara's assiduously detailed subject matter—time itself, and the human experience of it.

In Kawara's work, we are held captive by time. Seconds, minutes, days and months pass, sometimes without register, except when something exceptional makes us pause. Conversely, Kawara obsessively documents the fleeting moments where seemingly nothing happens through postcards, telegrams, calendars and meticulously sharp paintings. Coming to prominence in the mid-1960s, Kawara was part of a cohort of artists who wanted to strip art of emotion, instead relying on pure information or ideas, playing down the idea of ‘object’ in art. Born in Japan, Kawara settled in New York, preferring a more nomadic lifestyle.

It's perhaps strange to equate such a stringent record of how time slips past us with the idea of freedom, as suggested by the exhibition’s title. Yet, there is something meditative in glancing through Kawara's expansive oeuvre, accumulated through a life that, on display in the gallery, seems as ordinary as our own. The works are arranged in a manner that allows visitors a chance to sit with them, to reflect on their experience of passing days. As Kwok notes, "When we came to plan the exhibition, we tried to understand his principles, his roots, carefully. [The show] is very much guided by a sense of restraint and the position that we really want to honour the quietness and the contemplative essence of his work."

The curators bring together Kawara's most celebrated series of works, Today, I Am Still Alive, I Got Up, I Met, I Went, I Read and live performances of One Million Years for the showcase. The focus on Kawara's text-centric work underscores the curators’ intention of evoking universal experiences that force one to consider our own subjectivity in interpreting them. It’s perhaps the repetitive nature of Kawara’s artistic practice—almost the same painting created day by day, the same mediums used, the same language recreated—that makes it a meditative act, a relentless and definite cycle. Each series depicts the Japanese artist's unique perspective on art production, not so intent on representation, symbolism or abstraction of the human condition, but on the persistence of recording what it means to be human on a daily basis for posterity. "We feel that nowadays a lot of exhibitions are very visual. And it's not just exhibitions, but in general, the way we receive information [is] driven by visuals and images. That's why we wanted to present an aspect of art that might be challenging to a lot of audiences," Kwok elaborates.

Kawara's painting series Today, for instance, carefully documents a particular date in the Japanese artist's life, in white letters against a solid background. It provides its viewer with no other information. The only other context for the conceptual artworks are the newspaper clippings from the day that the painting was created, which line the box in which the painting is contained. Is there something significant about the days on which the artist produced these paintings, instead of working on other projects? On these minutiae, the paintings are silent. And perhaps, if these were works by some other artist, not so insularly obsessed with the idea of time, this would not be a question to consider. In fact, as Kwok tells STIR, the precise craftsmanship of the Today paintings took up almost an entire day for Kawara to produce. "Every day, painting would take up to seven hours to finish. That's why sometimes he doesn't have paintings [for a particular day]. He also set a rule for himself that if he could not finish [a painting] by midnight, he would just destroy what he had been working on."

Kawara's oeuvre is an intimate portrait of the artist for the viewer to discover. The postcards and telegrams that Kawara sent to a regular correspondence of friends offer a glimpse of the artist’s daily routines. In I Got Up (1968–79), Kawara marks postcards with the date, his name, his current address, the name and address of the recipient and the time at which he woke on that day, always phrased the same. His I Met series similarly documents the names of everyone the artist met on a particular day, all maintained in a detailed list for each day between 1968 and 1979. The I Went series, in the same vein, records Kawara’s movement through the city he is in on a photocopy of a local map. While these records present their viewer with only a vague understanding of Kawara’s life, they do point to the simple fact of his existence. A fact that is perhaps most pronounced in his I Am Still Alive telegrams. It began with three telegrams that the artist sent in 1969 that read in succession: “I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DON’T WORRY”; “I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE WORRY”; and “I AM GOING TO SLEEP FORGET IT.” It’s the most intimate view we get of the artist. Over the course of more than three decades, he sent almost 900 telegrams of this nature, some in response to inquiries by curators, artists and collaborators. I AM STILL ALIVE, Kawara declares.

For the showcase at Tai Kwun, the curators sought to depict the life of an artist who was perhaps not entirely decipherable, but whose message lies in that very medium that he is obsessed with. In order to locate Kawara's nomadic practice within the context of Hong Kong, the exhibition pivots around a series of works Kawara created during a visit to the city in 1978, for his 46th birthday. During this time, he did not let up on the rituals that ordered his days, creating Today series paintings while also diligently documenting his movements through his other ongoing series. It's these that visitors seem to gravitate towards, Kwok notes. "People [have been] trying to find connections in the historical moments or even the postcards," she elaborates.

While the intention of the exhibition is to allow audiences a moment of respite, to let go of the inhibitions that art might be difficult to understand, or too abstract, it also asks for a sense of presence. The fact that the incessant passing of time can be meditative, can even feel cathartic, is potently captured by Kawara’s obsessive practice of documentation. As Kwok says, "He's very special, [in the fact] that formula, data, or text can be really cold. But somehow his work is so raw and so personal." The restraint of time, in fact, becomes a sort of freedom itself.