Perhaps the strangest experience I've had at an exhibition this year was being led into a small room by a polite museum attendant, shown to a desk with a sheet of paper and some colored pencils, and being asked to draw — just as soon as the lights were switched off!

Faced with total darkness and a quickly fading memory of which colored pencils lay where, I was forced to rely on my sense of touch and flailing imagination to get by. In the cold, harsh light of day, the explosive piece of chromatically illiterate abstract expressionism I generated now seems like a childish attempt to conjure up light by moving the pencils quickly. This experience, designed to make us think afresh about the light-dependent nature of color, is part of "Language, Time, Life," an unusual, enjoyable, and, at times, exasperating retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo that looks at over four decades of work by Tatsuo Kawaguchi.

Like other established Japanese conceptual artists — secure enough in their reputations and old enough to be a little stubborn — Kawaguchi strikes the same note of gnostic perversity that typifies the best Zen masters and their paradoxical koans, although when I make this flattering remark, he shows his trademark humility.