NIGO, Handeishi and Hagi Ware’s New Generation: Why Japan’s Ceramics Keep Changing

A streetwear pioneer enters the tea room

A fashion designer who helped turn a Tokyo neighborhood into a global cultural reference point is bringing a different kind of object into focus: the hand-built Japanese tea bowl. An exhibition opening in Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture, on October 31 will place 25 bowls made by NIGO beside 55 works from his collection by Kawakita Handeishi, the businessman and celebrated modern ceramic artist who died in 1963.

The pairing is more than a celebrity endorsement. NIGO took up making tea bowls after encounters with Hagi pottery and with Handeishi’s work. And next door, a second exhibition will introduce five contemporary Hagi ceramists who are pushing against inherited forms. Together they offer a compact account of how Japanese cultural traditions grow through exchange, not isolation.

The surprising origins of Hagi ware

Hagi ware is closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, but its technical ancestry crosses borders. In the early 1600s, after warlord Mōri Terumoto established his seat at Hagi, potters from the Korean peninsula helped establish official domain kilns. The regional tradition grew in what are now Hagi and Nagato. The movement of Korean artisans must also be understood against the coercion and disruption associated with Japan’s late-sixteenth-century invasions of Korea.

Soft-feeling clay bodies, characteristic glaze effects and the way a vessel changes through use are part of Hagi’s reputation. But it would be misleading to imagine one immutable “traditional Hagi bowl.” Each generation adjusts materials, firing, decoration and the purpose of the vessel.

How a craft survived the end of feudal patronage

The Meiji Restoration ended the domain-based support on which many potters had depended. Hagi’s fortunes declined before a twentieth-century renewal associated with the twelfth Sakakura Shinbee (1881–1960), who helped reposition local pottery within tea culture. Later, the tenth Miwa Kyūsetsu, Kyūwa (1895–1981), and eleventh Miwa Kyūsetsu, Jūsetsu (1910–2012), developed influential white-glaze work through an exchange that included Handeishi.

The resulting Kyūsetsujiro white surface is a reminder that what viewers now recognize as Hagi tradition was itself shaped by innovation. In the museum’s account, a line connects feudal workshops, twentieth-century tea practice and the choices of living artists.

Handeishi: a banker who refused a narrow identity

Kawakita Handeishi (1878–1963) was born into a merchant family, grew up in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, and became president of Hyakugo Bank. He pursued the tea ceremony, calligraphy, painting and poetry as well as pottery, taking the latter up in middle age and pursuing it seriously in his fifties. He later devoted attention to younger makers.

He was not an industrial designer seeking perfect replication. The appeal of a tea bowl can lie in unexpected movement of clay, irregularity at the rim or the unpredictable meeting of glaze and fire. Those qualities can be deliberately cultivated, but they cannot be reduced to a standardized factory specification. Handeishi remains a provocative counterpart to the control and reproducibility of modern luxury branding.

Why NIGO turned to clay

The museum traces NIGO’s encounter with Handeishi to his own pottery-making in Hagi. He later visited places linked to the older artist, including the Kōei kiln in Tsu, now known as Senkaku kiln, and workshops in Hagi and Nagato. His collection is the starting point, but the 25 bowls of his own making are what make the encounter a conversation between creative generations.

NIGO, born in 1970, helped build the international profile of Harajuku streetwear in the 1990s; he founded HUMAN MADE in 2010 and has worked as artistic director at KENZO. A figure accustomed to recognizable design languages now confronts a craft in which small changes of touch, clay and heat make every object singular. The show does not establish that all his bowls were made by the same process or compare their artistic merit with Handeishi’s. Those judgments belong to careful inspection of the exhibited work.

Five artists pressing Hagi ware forward

The companion exhibition, Hagi Ware New Age, presents Okada Yasushi, Shibuya Eiichi, Tahara Takao, the sixteenth Sakakura Shinbee and Miwa Taro. The prefecture describes them as artists in their forties and fifties working in productive tension with inherited materials and techniques. Their inclusion signals a concern larger than celebrity: how can a regional craft grow without severing its connection to place?

A kiln’s lineage is not a substitute for artistic achievement. Nor does innovation automatically mean a radical-looking object. It may involve glaze composition, firing, surface, tactile feel or the idea of what a tea bowl can do. The value of this exhibition is the opportunity to see those decisions together. Its individual works still need to be assessed after opening.

From museum case to tea ceremony

The museum has scheduled a November 14 tea gathering using bowls made by NIGO and a November 15 gathering using bowls by the five Hagi Ware New Age exhibitors. The announced participation charges are ¥1,000 and ¥700, respectively, and places are limited. Online reservations open October 25 at 9 a.m., according to the organizers.

That is a revealing curatorial choice. A ceramic vessel is a sculptural object, but it is also something a person holds, drinks from and washes. The experience of its weight and lip cannot be captured fully in a photograph. Design in a tea room depends on the body as much as the eye.

The international opportunity—and its limits

A global fashion audience may discover Hagi pottery for the first time through NIGO. For local potters, such attention could open a wider market, but the economic effects have not been measured. Craft livelihoods depend on kilns, materials, skilled labor, apprentices and customers who value careful work rather than merely a moment of notoriety.

Hagi’s history also resists the simplistic idea of a sealed national tradition. Korean ceramic expertise helped bring the craft into being; domain patronage shaped it; the Meiji transition almost unraveled its economics; modern tea artists reinvented it. The question facing this generation is not whether outside influence can be allowed in. It has always been part of the story.

How to see the exhibitions

Both exhibitions run October 31–December 20, 2026, at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Hagi Uragami Museum, second-floor galleries. Opening hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last admission at 4:30 p.m. General admission is ¥1,500; admission is free for visitors aged 18 and under. The museum lists closures on November 9, 16, 24 and 30, and December 14. The seventh Hagi Contemporary Ceramics Prize exhibition runs concurrently.

This is an advance report based on the prefecture’s October 14 announcement and museum materials, not an eyewitness review or an interview with the artists. Its central contention is historical rather than promotional: Hagi ceramics has stayed alive by changing, and the coming exhibitions put the people making those changes in the same room.