The first time I meet Oki Sato, founder of the Tokyo-based design firm Nendo, he doesn’t have time to talk. He and a half-dozen assistants are too busy pasting tens of thousands of tiny white dots onto the floor of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, a monolithic white tower across from the southwest corner of Central Park. It’s the day before an exhibition of his work is supposed to open, and even though his crew has been stickering for a week, creating a soft, gradated effect between the gallery’s wooden floor and the white risers that hold his various products, he still isn’t happy with how it looks.
That Sato is a perfectionist is no surprise. The tall, slim design phenom looks the part, wearing gleaming white Adidas shell toe sneakers devoid of scuffs, a fitted sweater vest, and an immaculate tan trench coat. His work follows a long-standing tradition in Japanese design of poetic products with minimalist expression — everything from armchairs to cellphones, lovingly reduced to their most elemental forms. Designing in this way is less about personal expression than about obsessively studying an object and cutting away the ornamental fat. Sato’s work conforms to this traditional standard primarily in that it is devoid of colour; otherwise, his approach is decidedly more playful than his contemporaries’.
Take, for instance, his Cord-Chair, which is elevated on one of the museum’s risers. It appears to be nothing more than a set of impossibly slender round legs attached to a simple seat and backrest — a wooden chair pared down to the bare minimum. However, the design isn’t as clear cut as it appears. If the legs were merely wood, they would collapse under regular use. To make the seat strong enough, Sato devised a steel skeleton that fits inside the wooden components, providing the necessary strength. Because the walls of the legs are only three millimetres thick, all the work must be done by hand. It takes two Japanese craftspeople more than a month to make a single chair — construction that is anything but simple.
Why not just make a chair with thicker legs? “We are interested more in the story behind the product than in the product itself,” he tells me quietly when I see him again on the day of the exhibition opening, the sticky dots now laid in their perfect positions. “We want to show things that provide small surprises. Not too much surprise, but very small ideas that resonate with everyday life.”
Small they may be, but the thirty-three-year-old’s surprises have made him one of Japan’s biggest design stars. And there’s another surprise. Have a peek at the Museum of Modern Art’s database for its permanent collection, which includes one of Sato’s chairs, and you’ll see something interesting about his nation of origin: it’s Canada.
Sato was born and raised in Toronto, where his father worked as an executive with Pioneer. When he was eleven, his family moved back to Tokyo. He hasn’t returned to Canada since and doesn’t actually consider himself Canadian, but still credits his upbringing with giving him a different perspective on Japanese aesthetics. “In a way, I’m sort of like a foreigner in Japan,” he says, noting that when he arrived in Tokyo, “everything was new to me and very interesting.” Even though many years have passed, he still describes his way of thinking as “a mixture of Canada and Tokyo together.” He attended the formal architecture school at Waseda University in Tokyo, but continued to look for light moments — the sctv influence, one might say. “It was very strict when I studied architecture for six years,” he says. “There were rules, and everything was very logical. I was feeling a little uncomfortable with that.”
He found his niche after finishing his degrees, when he toured the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the world’s largest and most important furniture fair, in April 2002. “Everyone was designing very freely and looked very happy,” he says. “I didn’t know that architects were allowed to design other objects, like furniture.” But he did know that he wanted in on the fun.
Upon returning to Tokyo, he set up Nendo (“clay” in Japanese). The name signified that he wanted the flexibility to design whatever he desired, as though out of unformed putty — from quirky consumer goods to furniture to art installations to interiors to full buildings. Starting a company right out of school was risky, but it paid off. Nendo began winning design awards in its very first year, and has been nothing short of prolific since, attracting commissions from many of the most prestigious names in European contemporary furniture, including Cappellini, Thonet Vienna, Moroso, and Swedese. Rare in the design world, the firm has proven adept at both designing objects for mass production and creating limited production pieces that appeal to art collectors.
“Nendo is a really interesting phenomenon,” says Holly Hotchner, director of the Museum of Arts and Design. “They’re a newer generation, looking at similar sets of problems,” as other designers do, but finding innovative solutions and modes of expression. The company, she says, is among “the most creative” makers of objects in Japan today.
This month, Sato returns to the Milan furniture fair, as he has done every year since 2002. Nendo has had a larger presence at each edition, showing more new designs with more manufacturers and lately producing special installations. For most young designers, a single product launch with a major manufacturer would signal that they’ve arrived; Sato will debut no fewer than ten new objects at this year’s fair, with a variety of companies.
