The Japanese Art Sound Archive presents a solo exhibition on TWO HEARTBEATS OF MINE, a piece produced by Norio Imai in 1976. This item forms part of Imai’s series of pieces using his heartbeats. The series began with This Accidental Co-action as an Incident produced by Norio Imai, Toru Kuranuki, and Saburo Muraoka in 1972. This piece was reproduced and showcased in an exhibition named “MUSIC” organized by HEAR (Takako Okamoto and Yukio Fujimoto) at XEBEC in 1993.

This solo exhibition organized by the Japanese Art Sound Archive exhibits the original work of art that was recently discovered along with his more contemporary pieces. TWO HEARTBEATS OF MINE has been displayed along with a description of the history of this piece as well as certain relevant documents. In addition, a recording of This Accidental Co-action as an Incident has been released as a cassette edition at the exhibition venue.

Throughout the history of Japanese art, there has been artists that filled museums, galleries, studios and other public spaces with all sorts of sounds. In most cases, however, once the sound faded, it couldn’t be heard again. Within Japanese art history, which has been mainly reliant on visual archives, information concerning sound has been often left in a fragmentary state. Japanese Art Sound Archives is a project that aims to collect those often inaccessible sound activities of the past and make them more accessible for consultation.

The project consists of the gathering and classification of information related to sounds created by artists, including interviews with artists and people who witnessed them producing the sounds, bibliographic surveys, recorded materials preserved by the artists themselves, as well as discourses surrounding those works. The project also offers opportunities to reproduce or re-enact sound pieces from the past, either by the artist themselves or our supporters, and present them in multiple forms, ranging from vinyl records to events and exhibitions. The project is devoted to building the foundations needed to examine the meanings of sound in Japanese art, as well as facilitating the cultivation of its potentials.

We face a lot of questions when we look back and examine the role of sounds in the history of Japanese art – What roles did they hold in different art-historical movements? How were they associated with and differentiated from other contemporary art forms like music? What contexts did they have in relation to visual and aural cultures of the day? One of the most important missions of this project is to provide people with an archive of actual sounds from which they can explore those questions.