Duvernoy, Sophie - "The Beating of My Art", Review

The Beating of My Art
Japanese artist Sasaki's gratings are inspired by heartbeats

What's the start ingest memory that the sound of a heartbeat can conjúre?
Japanese artist Sasaki has a pretty good answer "Once, a very small child told me that he remembered this sound. It's probably what he heard in the mother's womb." SASAKI - he goes by his last name only, in all caps - drew this boy's heartbeat years ago in Japan. Two weekends ago, the artist was in L.A. at the Dwell on Design conference, recording the heartbeats of passersby and volunteers in his minimal installation art.
SASAKI has been drawing heartbeats for nearly 16 years now, and moved to Los Angeles last year to continue his Heartbeat drawing in new setting. "For about 10 years, I drew my own heartbeat. About four years ago, I started draw the heartbeats of other people," he tells L.A. Weekly. Talk about studying a subject.
He says the idea first came to him on a trip to Shanghai in 1994. "China was changing rapidly then. Many people were staying in Shanghai, maybe 20 million. I don't know how, but I saw the heartbeat, and I started drawing the heartbeat. Soon after, I thought, if I use a heartbeat, everybody can understand what this is. It means that my artwork - a heartbeat drawing - ca communicate with everyone," he says.
His work is a series of paradoxes. It's minimal art for everyone, a conceptual portrait of a population by a self-effacing technician. His painting process at Dwell on Design was arrestingly dramatic: Zipping himself up into a silver suit, he hooked volunteers up to a finger heartbeat monitor. A low, rhythmic thumping played back through the speaker. Sometimes it sped up as volunteers became nervous on hearing their heart beating.

SASAKI jumped up onto a rig and drew quickly, adding a slinky red line to the many that were already on the wall, modulating it according to the beat playing back at him. It was flashy, all right, but everything centered around the heartbeat itself, not the man in the silver suit. "Silver is not a color, it's just a reflection. If I draw a heartbeat, my mind is almost like a zero, because I have to concentrate on the sound," SASAKI says.
Each work he makes contains many similar vacillating lines in his signature, somewhat pinkish red - yet each line is slightly different, and corresponds to the individual riythm of a person's heartbeat. SASAKI explains, gesturing at his installation, "This drawing is like a color field. And it's a monochrome painting. But the waves are all different from each other. It's both minimal and not minimal."
SASAKI calls his color "Heartbeat Red," just as famed New Realist painter Yves Klein had International Klein Blue. He's also inspired by Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, high priests of minimal art and repetition. SASAKI's works are perhaps more organic - they appear to glow with energy, and the simple line create a strikingly beautiful light- and color-filled field.
SASAKI is exhibiting a "Heartbeat Drawing" installation at Venice Biennale until November, for which he drew 299 visitor's heartbeats for three minutes each. He left one empty plate hanging on the wall, "to represent the possibility of a 300th drawing."
Will the exhibition at Biennale make him step forward, out of his self-described role as simple "art technician" and into the shoes of an L.A. artist? "Myself? Nothing. I'm just drawing heartbeats," he says.