On Kawara | One Million Years

On Kawara (1932–2014) was a Japanese conceptual artist who was known for his singular focus on the passage of time with his text-based paintings on which he would paint the day’s date on monochromatic canvas--a practice which continued over the course of 48 years and resulted in several thousand paintings made in hundreds of places around the world.

Other notable series include I Got Up, for which Kawara mailed postcards to friends stamped with the time he had gotten out of bed that day and the address where he was staying. In I Went, he traced his daily steps in red pen onto photocopied maps. Each series applied an impersonal system to document the mundane but unique details of his life. 

In 1969, he began the monumental project One Million Years, in which two volumes of leatherbound books include 2,068 pages each simply listing years laid out in 10 columns, aligned and subdivided in 5 blocks of 100 years. Of the two volumes, Past was produced in 1969 and listed 998,031 B.C. through 1969 A.D. Future was created in 1981, starts in 1993 AD and ends one million years later, in 1,001,992. Together these volumes encompass over two million years. 

Since 1993, institutions and galleries have produced recorded readings of the two volumes, beginning with Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea. During the 11th edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany, participants took turns reading the dates for the duration of the 100-day exhibition, and in 2004, a seven-day long continuous reading took place outside in Trafalgar Square, London. Each new session begins where the previous one ended until the contents of all ten volumes of both works have been read aloud. As of 2024, forty-five live readings and sound installations of One Million Years: Past and Future have been conducted and/or recorded in 31 cities around the world.