Seiji Yamauchi | Create Your Badge

Sex：male, Blood：B type RH+, Stature：171cm, Weight：64kg, Nationality： Japanese, Occupation：Asset Management

I lived in London from 1990 to 1994. My studio was a victorian red brick apartment located near Slone Square, Chelsea. It's my favorite settings to feel the reality of my day-to-day life in the history, in the other words, current of the times, although I had to bear shortage of hot water in the bathroom because of the antique boiler.

One sunny day I took a look around an antique fair at the Chelses community centre along Kings Road. Most of displayed items were secondhand rather antique. Suddenly my eyes were attracted by a small spoon with a label written as "trefid teaspoon in 1680s" in a shabby showcase. This strange shaped spoon moved my heart mysteriously. It became a first item in my antique spoon collection. Since then this mysterious story teller told me a lot of interesting stories about the history of tea, silver, society and so on. Among these stories, I was especially interested in Rococo Naturalism. Japanese have been lived with the nature and it's usual to use the natual things as daily utensils however they scarcely intend to imitate the nature as the utensils like Rococo naturalism did. So it was culture schock for me when I first looked at a leaf-shaped spoon with incects. I tried to know more details about the naturalistic spoon however it is very limited information about its origin and historical importance through the design history. I decided to collect these interesting, beautiful and mysterious things.

Apart from spoons, I also started to collect various antiques.
- Chinese pottery and porcelain from Neolithic period to Xin-dynasty
- "Ukiyo-e" wood brock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai.
- Sclipophily collecting old financial certificate like bonds and stocks
- Furnitures from 18th to 19th century

It's my pleasure to walk around the world to take a look antique shops and museums and enjoy local food and wine with the feeling of current of the times described in the first paragraph of "方丈記 Houjoh-ki" (The ten foot square hut) written by Buddhist priests 鴨長明 Kamo-no-chohmei (1153-1216) in 1212.

The flow of the river is. ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubble that float in the pools, now vanishing, now. forming, are not of long duration : so in the world are man and his dwellings...

Seiji Yamauchi