Matsubayashi Hosai XVI (b. 1980, Uji, Kyoto) is a ceramic artist and the sixteenth-generation head of the Asahiyaki kiln, which has been active for approximately 400 years beside the Uji River, at the foot of Mount Asahi. Born as the eldest son of Matsubayashi Hosai XV, he graduated from the Faculty of Law at Doshisha University in 2003 and, after a year working in shipping, began his ceramic training in 2004 — first studying wheel-throwing at a specialist institute operated by Kyoto Prefecture, then apprenticing under his father. In 2015 he worked at the Leach Pottery in St Ives and presented an exhibition and tea ceremony at the Musée Guimet in Paris. In 2016 he succeeded to the name Hosai XVI in a ceremony at Jodo-in, a sub-temple of Byodoin, and was presented with calligraphy of the character “Asahi” by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado, which he uses as his seal. Each generation of Asahiyaki has renewed the kiln’s technique in its own time — his grandfather introduced a smokeless noborigama (climbing kiln) — and Hosai XVI regards this continuity of change, rather than any fixed style, as the true substance of the kiln’s tradition. The clay he uses is dug from a low hill built up over centuries from sediment once carried by the Uji River and later uplifted; since the mid-Edo period, each generation has dug and laid aside clay for the next, allowing it to age for decades before it is worked — an inherited discipline he regards as a form of sustainability embedded in the kiln’s structure long before the term existed. He works with this long-aged clay, throwing on the wheel, firing with wood and gas, and glazing with plant ash. His work moves between the traditional Asahiyaki idioms of kase (“deer-back”) and benikase — mottled surfaces that draw out the character of the Uji clay — and geppaku, the pale “moon-white” glaze through which he has extended the kiln’s lineage into a new style. In firing, he strives for full command of the kiln while accepting the uncertainty that nature always retains beyond every effort of control — an uncontrollable remainder in which, for him, the beauty of the work partly resides. At the heart of his practice is kirei-sabi, the aesthetic sensibility inherited within Asahiyaki, which unites refined, luminous beauty with a plain, primitive one — a sensibility he seeks to rearticulate through his own experience as an artist living in the present, rather than preserve as a fixed style. Through making and through the practice of tea gatherings, he works to reconnect tea culture with contemporary society, creating occasions for people from different cultures, generations and disciplines to meet. He is a member of GO ON, a collective of Kyoto craftspeople collaborating with designers, architects and makers across disciplines. Matsubayashi Hosai XVI has been represented by Spazio Nobile since 2025.
