On Kawara was born in Japan in 1933. During the 1950s he was a prominent member of the postwar Tokyo avant-garde, producing figurative work in a late-Surrealist style. Kawara left Japan in 1959, traveling to Mexico City, Paris and New York, where he settled in 1964. 

By 1966 he had devoted his work solely to the schematic representation of time and place through calendars, maps, lists, postcards and telegrams. Kawara's primary body of work, which occupied him until his death in 2014, is the Today series, a sequence of paintings produced according to strict protocols of size, color and technique. An incessant traveler, the artist produced Date Paintings in 136 cities and various languages.