The designer Shigeya Miyata explores the borderlands between design and art through an approach that reflects Japan’s industrial legacy, while staying closely connected to the art world. His practice isn’t limited to functional objects: each project becomes a field of tension between material, gesture, and perception, questioning the role of the forms that inhabit everyday life.
The project pause is a line of objects inspired by the Honda universe, and it’s emblematic of this research. Miyata takes mechanical components engineered for movement and fixes them in concrete, suspending their original function. In this state of forced stillness, the parts reveal a precision and beauty that often go unnoticed, shifting from elements of a vehicle into domestic objects. The transition from dynamic to static becomes a reflection on the expressive potential hidden inside function.
With object 01, a high stool built around the theme of discovery, Shigeya Miyata shifts the focus to the user’s experience. By stripping the seat of an immediately recognizable form, he invites us to discover its function through the body and touch, rather than through visual information. The object becomes a tool for relationships: not just a chair, but a way to create attachment to space through direct experience.
In “shin-karesansui – Void Reveals Entity” — a project more closely tied to art and graphic design — the focus shifts to absence. An imagined digital scene is inscribed into a transparent medium, where what exists are voids, shadows, and hollows. It is precisely conceptual emptiness that generates a visual presence, showing how perception can construct reality even in the absence of a physical entity.
Alongside his personal practice, Miyata is also creative director of the Japanese design studio ooooo. The studio doesn’t confine itself to a single field, but moves across different disciplines, fostering collaborations that can generate value that wouldn’t emerge within a single domain.
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Through these projects and his creative direction at ooooo, Shigeya Miyata builds a coherent practice that questions the boundary between object and experience, function and contemplation. His work invites us to look at things more closely, allowing meanings to emerge only when the gesture — or the function itself — is placed on pause.
