ArtistJapanese
Yasu Sasamoto
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Yasuaki 'Yasu' Sasamoto trained as an architect at a Japanese university, graduating in 1975. He spent two formative years in the United States immediately after, absorbing the industrial design culture of post-countercultural America before returning to Japan in 1977. Those years abroad left a visible imprint: his subsequent furniture work never treated construction as something to conceal.
After 1978, Sasamoto shifted his focus to product and furniture design. A brief period designing watches for a Swiss company from 1984 to 1987 sharpened his attention to precision and material economy. In 1989, he established Dulton Company Ltd. in Japan, a manufacturer and retailer of household goods that would become the vehicle for his most enduring designs.
Sasamoto's most recognized pieces are his steel stools, produced for Dulton from the 1970s onward. The Wisdom Tooth stool, designed in 1988, takes its organic, rounded seat form directly from a human molar - a sculptural joke that also produces a genuinely comfortable, stackable chair. The Lotus stool works similarly: visibly bolted steel construction, a seat shaped by function rather than ornament. Both designs reflect an architectural mindset that treats connection points and structural elements as part of the visual language rather than something to hide beneath upholstery.
His collapsible saddle stool - a stainless steel tractor seat on a folding frame - sits in a different register, closer to utilitarian Scandinavian farm equipment than Japanese minimalism, and suggests the breadth of his reference points. The pieces occupy a middle ground that does not fit neatly into any single design movement: too playful for strict functionalism, too rigorous for postmodern decoration.
On the Nordic secondary market, Sasamoto's Dulton pieces circulate steadily among dealers and collectors of vintage Japanese design. His stools appear at Scandinavian auction houses including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Göteborgs Auktionsverk, and Bukowskis, as well as through Danish platforms like Palsgaard Kunstauktioner, which accounts for the largest share of Auctionist listings. The strongest recorded sale in our data is a folding saddle stool that achieved 2,851 SEK. Prices tend to reflect condition and model rarity rather than name recognition alone.