His early paintings interrogated the meaning of untitledness, a regular "title" applied to abstract and nonrepresetational art in the twentieth century. He sustained his interest in semiotics in later paintings by focusing on the physicality yet flatness of words painted in stencil on canvas, thereby questioning the categories and visual structure of written language. Arakawa is uninterested in the "hand" of the artist and claims no dedication to painting per se, which he sees as a vehicle for the exploration of complex, philosophical questions about the gap between objects and words, between seeing and speaking. His work is cool and analytical, seemingly mechanical, like the Minimalists, and appropriates the everyday (the objects and words he focuses on are often mundane), like Pop artists. His paintings are visually similar to scientific diagrams and conceptually akin to philosophical treatises.

Impressionable Stretching (1977-78) employs motifs recurrent in his work of the 1960s and 1970s: diagrammatic tubes, which echo Duchamp, and stenciled words presented legibly and in reverse. The phrases are plays on the language of art (texture, space, perspective, etc.). Arakawa is encouraging us to question our position as perceivers both of visual material presented in the painting and in the relationship of painting and of art, to the language used to describe it. A specific strand of this dialogue concerns space, which is presented two-dimensionally both in the receding, changing shapes of the tubes, which appear from different angles, and in the forwards-and-backwards rendering of the word, SPACE, drawing attention to the disconnects between written word, perspective rendering, and the viewer's own position in space in relation to the painting.