Seiko watchmaking meets art at the Forest of Mechanisms at DESIGNART TOKYO 2025

Seiko has had a long history of innovation and engineering advancement since its founder, Kintaro Hattori, opened his watch shop in 1881 and turned it into a thriving watch-making business. 

Among other early achievements, the company produced the first Japanese-made wristwatch (the Laurel) in 1913, broadcast Japan’s first television commercial in 1953 and produced the country’s first automatic wristwatch (the Automatic) in 1956.

The brand opened the Seiko Seed venue in 2022 to push the boundaries in watchmaking. The Forest of Mechanisms (Karakuri no Mori) showcase was launched in the same year, presenting artistic exhibits by Seiko’s in-house design team and other Japanese creatives based on its mechanical timepieces. 

“Forest of Mechanisms serves as a space where creators, engineers and designers come together to present installations that explore and celebrate these diverse charms that extend beyond mechanisms — beyond the realm of watchmaking technology itself,” says Yugo Hibayashi, senior manager, design director from Seiko Watch Corporation’s Product Design Department.

He elaborates, “Seiko has long pursued the essence of watchmaking — the fundamental function of conveying time — while continuously refining its unique technologies. Through this journey, we have discovered that beyond this core function lie new dimensions of fascination, including beauty and intrigue.”

A merging of disciplines

Since 2022, Seiko Seed has partnered with DESIGNART TOKYO, a creative event that brings art, design and technology to the city’s shops, malls and galleries. This year’s collaboration will continue with DESIGNART TOKYO 2025, held from October 31 to November 9.

The response was overwhelming, attracting visitors of all ages, locals, and international tourists. This year, the event shifts from its Harajuku location for the last three years to Light Box Studio in Minami-Aoyama.

“Compared to the bustling, modern venue in Harajuku, the Minami-Aoyama location offers an elegant and creative atmosphere,” says Hibayashi. 

The first floor will showcase installations by Seiko’s designers, as well as by three external designers and groups. The second floor will highlight Seiko’s design activities and host talks, seminars, and workshops.

“Through these exhibitions and activities, we aim to highlight the excellence of Seiko Watch Corporation’s technology and the breadth of our design expertise, expressed through diverse perspectives while engaging visitors and inspiring a growing community of Seiko enthusiasts,” Hibayashi mentions.

Creative interpretations

“Rain creates ripples, and light casts shadows,” reflects Kosei Komatsu of his attempts to find “beauty and the essence of life in everyday phenomena”. At this year’s Forest of Mechanisms, he will present Moon, which features circular stainless steel plates rotating slowly in roughly one-minute cycles to evoke “the earth’s cycles and the passage of time”.  

Komatsu will also present a second work together with designer Kensho Miyoshi. Entitled PUWANTS, the work is a new addition to a series the pair has worked on for a decade. “Rising bubbles impart movement to plant-like forms within a tank, creating a sense of rhythm and new life in the water,” Komatsu describes.

Miyoshi will also showcase two installations. His second exhibit is Movements of Time. 

“(It) transforms the inner workings of Seiko mechanical watches into sound. By recording the ticking of balance wheels at six, eight, and 10 beats per second, along with the rotation sounds of winding rotors, the piece re-imagines homological precision as a form of poly-rhythmic music,” says Miyoshi, who hopes that visitors will sense that “time is not only measured, but also felt”. 

Spline Design Hub’s showcase, entitled Cadence of the Spiral, is inspired by the mainspring and hairspring encountered during the disassembly of a mechanical watch.

“The work features a spiral structure made of long, supple stainless-steel plates supported by multiple arms. Each arm extends and retracts independently, imparting alternating tension and release to the spiral,” describes the team. 

The movements interact across the structure to continuously generate new patterns of order, moment by moment, says the team, who aim to bridge the gap “between technology and aesthetics, hardware and software, and logic and intuition”.  

Visualising time

Naoya Sugita, who is part of Seiko Watch Corporation’s team, draws on Seiko Design Center’s philosophy, ‘Illuminate your life’. His installation, titled Traces of Time, was inspired by the intricate movements of mechanical watches. 

“By extending the motion of watch hands and creating patterns in sand, the work allows visitors to see and experience the otherwise invisible flow of time,” he says. 

These patterns constantly evolve, reflecting time’s dual nature: both transient and permanent. Sugita mentions, “I invite visitors to quietly immerse themselves in this flow, observing the movement of the hands and the delicate traces they leave behind.”  

Hibayashi himself contributes an installation in which the watch hands ‘travel’ outside the case. “In this work, the watch hands are presented as tiny people and set free from their cases, creating a miniature world where each individual’s ‘time’ intersects,” he says. 

“By observing the tiny, human-shaped hands moving within this miniature world, I hope visitors will sense that within each watch they wear, the unique ‘time’ of its wearer flows.”