Design | Yusuke Seki Stands on the Ceramics of Giants

Tokyo-based designer Yusuke Seki was born in 1978 and worked for the Interior Design Office in Tokyo as well as corporations such as AU and Sony. He founded his own studio in 2008. Today he creates products as well as architectural space design. He’s exhibited at Milan Salone, Designer’s block, the Tokyo Style Exhibition, Stockholm Furniture and Light Fair.

In April Seki completed a spatial design for the Maruhiro Flagship Store in Nagasaki, Japan. The store produces Hasami ceramics, including pottery and porcelain. The region for which the ceramics are named has been producing ceramic tableware since the 17th century.

Seki’s design wraps in the history of Hasami ceramics inside a contemporary setting. Visitors to the store stand on load-bearing ceramics to reach the products, symbolic of all of the art and design that came before. Another angle on the cumulative presentation is that the platform is made of flawed firings. There are many failures before a maker can produce a final product.

From the designer:

“Constructed of 25,000 pieces and in cooperation with numerous pottery factories from Hasami area, the conceptual and experiential focus of the design is a stacked central platform, layers of locally sourced imperfect tableware and poured concrete. Each of these pieces called “Shinikiji” in Japanese, were found to be flawed after the initial bisque-firing by their respective local production facilities. As part of his re-valuative design process, Seki revived these pieces, using them to make bricks, and transforming  them to  a new architectural material for this occasion. Collected here, the stage is not only a representation of “Monohara”, the name given to the kiln-side specific areas where dispose its broken pieces on firing process, existing solely in Nagasaki, which have accrued these imperfect pieces for approximately 400 years—an archaeological mille-fille of the long industrial history of this region—but also creates a sense of reverence for this history, conveying the fragilely of the each individual item, engineered together to inspire and cultivate respect for the legacy on the whole.”

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