The Abstract Truth

The first time I heard the name On Kawara, it appeared in the newspaper the same day the newspaper printed my name and my winning number for the one million dollar lottery ticket. Kawara's name was printed under mine; we both won one million dollars! Before that, I had never heard the name anywhere, but it sounds Japanese to me. Coincidentally, I met him while we were redeeming our awards. Both of us were really happy, and we hugged each other and jumped up and down as if we had known each other for a long time. Ever since, we have been good friends. We contact each other once in a while and talk about what we each did with the free money.

Well, On took the money to open up his own art gallery exhibiting many of his own creations. He is such a great artist. He creates a new artwork every day; and whatever he doesn’t finish on the day, then he will dump it away. He has this one artwork called the “ 100 Year Calendar,” where I see two sheets of paper with many numbers. If I want to see what it says, I have to squint my eyes and slowly inch up my face closer to the art in order to get a clear view of each of the digits. The art contains 120 boxes with ten lines in each. Each line represents one month, and each horizontal line from one sheet to the other represents one year. The calendar is color coded: yellow is a day in the life of On Kawara, green is when a Date Painting is made, and red is when more than one painting is created. From his artwork, I imply that he is counting up to the total days until the exhibition’s opening day of his newly open gallery. Since he is counting down, he might as well count up the number of artworks that he will have available to show his viewers.

When looking at each day of our life separately, it looks meaningless; but when they are all added together, it creates, visually, a new meaning of life to us like a puzzle. Creating a new art every day may not seem like a lot to an artist; but when added together with all the other ones, there is much more than what we can count. A calendar is a good way to provide us with a quick overview of our life, and we can look back at what we have accomplished so far, while thinking of new goals to fill up the empty areas.

- Jia Hui Huang