Wataru Sakuma

Wataru Sakuma’s art and design playground started with the regard for the discarded and the overlooked. This aesthetic attitude combined with the transient nature of his formative years living a transnational life in 5 countries like Japan, Dubai, India, America and finally the  Philippines must have led him to his destined art material – the paper. The multi-cultural aesthetic and the transitory combination of his experience place an emphasis on the process-oriented mode of creation that organically produces layers and texture and a sense of impermanence in all of his works. That sensibility to accept the fleeting nature of things allows a different kind of chance occurrences in his works leading him to some fortuitous creations.

The same transiency brought him serendipitously, in 2004, to the Philippines. Sakuma’s initial foray in this country led him to join Masa Ecological Development Inc. as a designer. This company produces handmade paper products utilizing various local agricultural wastes such as pineapple leaves, banana trunks, cogon grass, rice straws and others. MASAECO was in fact, founded on a noble ground also by a Japanese, to open up employment for Filipinos in this country while introducing the technology of handmade paper-making as an ecological development. In this company, Sakuma started to build his aesthetic fidelity to the material humility and plasticity of the handmade paper and eventually took its helm. Here, in constant exploration with paper, Sakuma developed an austere and yet fragile sensibility that seem to coincide and empathize with the quality of human experience in the contemporary period being in eternal and complex transition.

Soon enough, that adventure in the Philippines steered him into recognition earning 9 Katha Awards for design from the organizers of Manila F.A.M.E. International. Thereafter, Sakuma became a valued consultant of the Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions of the Department of Trade and Industry and finally expanded his explorations into a wider range of materials without losing his vigorous commitment to the humble but multi-faceted potential of the paper. From 2014 to 2016, Sakuma was consultant to the government of Thailand for product development utilizing agricultural waste through the Department of International Trade Promotion.

Wataru Sakuma received a degree in Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in painting at Memphis college of Art in the U.S.A. In 2002, he was also granted a scholarship in New York for a studio residency program affiliated with the Parsons School of Design.

[Text by: Jose Jay B. Cruz]