Pink and Mirrors

The ceramics he encountered in his fourth year at university, when his job search was over and graduation was near, would shape the rest of Tomoyuki Hoshino's life. After joining a company, he enrolled at the Kyoto Prefectural Ceramists' Technical Institute and set out in earnest on the path of ceramics. After graduating he apprenticed under Yuichi Ikai and then became independent. From around the mid-2010s he began making the pink works that have become his theme. Today his highly original world of pink enjoys wide popularity. 

Pink and Mirrors

Works made by hand may be mirrors that reflect the person. Only through a mirror can we look at ourselves. Through the object that is the mirror, I can come to know myself. For the ceramic artist Tomoyuki Hoshino, his works are like a mirror, indispensable for bringing his inner self to the surface.

Each of us, as an individual existing in the real world, has many aspects: experience, environment, identity, innate personality. We are many-sided beings with various faces within a single existence. Among them, feelings of shyness and bashfulness are, in most people, almost always kept hidden. In the pink of Hoshino's works, a part of the self that cannot usually be shown yet is essential finds expression in a form that is pop and yet refined.

He arrived at this expression in a very natural way. From the time he began, unconsciously, to choose the color pink for his work, it seems that an aspect of Hoshino that could not be put into words had already begun to come to the surface.

As he went on making pink works, what prompted him to notice the connection between his inner life and his work were the words of Mr. Ikai: "As long as you do this work, you can't fake your character or who you are as a person." Works take form through the hands. To make things through one's own body, over the time of one's life, can be said to give form to the person himself. In the course of making, Hoshino came to think about the relation between his work, color and himself. And through making, and through dialogue with his finished works, he came to realize that his works are tied more strongly to his own inner world than to the outer world.

In the world of craft, many artists are deeply influenced by the outer world and aim, above all, to recreate the beauty found in nature; Hoshino's attention, by contrast, turned to bringing out his inner world. At the root of this, I feel, lies the impulse that first led him to ceramics: "I just wanted to make something." Curiosity about making things was his purpose from the start. That may be why, rather than the outer environment, the relationship between the object itself and the self who makes it came so clearly into relief.

His teacher's words, and what first led Hoshino to ceramics: various factors came together, and as the result of bringing out his inner world, he arrived at the pink works of today.

People have sides they do not want to show, sides that make them shy. But that side, too, is oneself. To express that self as a work is surely to live very much as oneself. In the refined texture of his glaze I sense a color like the hiding of embarrassment: a blush covered by a smile. 

Tomoyuki Hoshino

1976　
Born in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture
1999　
Graduated from Yokohama City University
2005　
Completed the forming course at the Kyoto Prefectural Ceramists' Technical Institute; studied under Yuichi Ikai
2007　
Became independent in Kokubunji, Tokyo
2013　
Recognized as a full member of the Japan Kogei Association
Japan Kogei Association Encouragement Prize, 60th Japan Traditional Kogei Exhibition
Encouragement Prize, 5th Kikuchi Biennale
2017
Special Judges' Award (selected by Sou Fujimoto), 11th International Ceramics Competition Mino
2023
"Ceramics in Progress," Musée Tomo

Collections
Kikuchi Collection
Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum
Ise Cultural Foundation
Fuchu City