Discover the Centuries-Old Japanese Matcha Tea Ceremonies That Last for Hours and Require Beautiful Utensils
A new exhibition at the National Museum of Asian Art showcases the longtime cultural meaning in the practice of chanoyu
:focal(2800x1880:2801x1881)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/f0/4b/f04b64a0-49c0-4002-8afb-df3d2181b1d2/gettyimages-1184657916.jpg)
The Japanese word for a tea ceremony, chanoyu, can be translated literally as “hot water for tea.” But the term chanoyu has also become associated with an entire formalized practice of preparing and consuming tea, especially matcha, powdered green tea.
In a contemporary tea ceremony, guests will lower their heads as they enter an intimate space that’s often surrounded by a garden. The host will have assembled unique, idiosyncratic tea utensils based on the gathering and time of year. In a formal event a host might present a kaiseki meal, but in all ceremonies the host initiates the complex process of creating tea. When usucha (thin tea) is prepared, hot water is scooped out of a kettle into a bowl with powdered green tea, which is then whipped with a bamboo whisk to achieve a frothy, foamy consistency and served to guests in individual bowls. When koicha (thick tea) is prepared, the process creates a more syrup-like consistency, and each guest takes a sip from one bowl of tea. In both cases, chanoyu is a highly choreographed practice that requires training and dedication. A tea ceremony lasts hours and creates a full sensory experience for the host and guests.
Japanese tea ceremonies didn’t always look this way. Prior to the 16th century in Japan, tea ceremonies were often displays of wealth and abundance by Japanese rulers and the warrior class. Yet starting in the 16th century, the tea master Sen Rikyu formalized the elaborate process of a tea ceremony—including the aesthetic architecture of spaces, the philosophy of wabi, which encourages simplicity and humility, and utilization of objects from various places in Asia.
Gregory Kinsey was introduced to the Japanese tea practice of chanoyu when he was around 6 years old. Although he grew up in Florida, and most of his family descended from French Huguenots, he did have Japanese family: His uncle was drafted into the Korean War and spent two years in Japan as an electrician, eventually marrying Yoshiko Asano, a member of a well-known business family in Japan with previous centuries-old ties to samurai. Although Kinsey’s Japanese American cousins had little interest in Japanese culture, Kinsey himself was interested, and he had a close relationship with his “Aunt Yoshiko” who he says was “on the same wavelength” as him. Kinsey spent many summers with his aunt deepening his appreciation for Japanese arts and culture. The Japanese side of Kinsey’s family embraced him learning chanoyu.
“They were very open-minded,” Kinsey says about his family, adding that they “understood intuitively that culture is not genetic—it’s an acquired, learned trade.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/43/5b/435b2c13-6b9c-4605-b859-5609bbfd6ba6/gettyimages-1258633678.jpg)
This mixture of tradition and experimentation, past and present, and training and collaboration is on full display at “Reasons to Gather: Japanese Tea Practice Unwrapped,” a new exhibition running through April 26, 2026, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Building on his family’s experience, Kinsey became a lifelong practitioner within the Urasenke tea school, building up a large collection of utensils, including stoneware bowls, tea caddies, bright lacquer trays, silk wraps and hanging scrolls, dating back to the 16th century. In 2019, he donated what he says is a numerical third of his collection to the museum—and 167 pieces were added to the museum’s Freer Study Collection for use in public demonstrations of chanoyu. Fifteen tea practice objects also entered the Freer’s permanent collection and are now on display in cases at the “Reasons to Gather” exhibition alongside their various storage boxes.
When putting together the exhibition, assistant curator of Japanese art Sol Jung wanted to emphasize the cross-cultural nature of the objects. Many of the exhibition’s objects (particularly the tea bowls) date back to before the 16th century and were originally from China, Korea and locales in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Jung says that these utensils were already considered special antiques by the time they reached Japanese collectors. The people who originally crafted the ceramics might not have seen themselves as artists as much as “makers.” In fact, many of the ceramics were not initially made for use in tea ceremonies, and Jung says that Japanese collectors “repurposed and appropriated” these objects for themselves.
“What we’re now associating with this very Japanese thing is actually quite cross-cultural and cosmopolitan and has a lot to do with trade and exchange,” Jung says. “I think it’s fascinating that within Japan, there’s this appreciation [for] things from other cultures. I think, yes, it’s a form of appropriation, but it sheds a different light on what it means to appropriate something when they’re treating these objects with a lot of respect and care and then combining them together with their own aesthetic approach.”
Kinsey agrees, saying that these objects provide evidence to how interconnected Asia was when these tea utensils traveled to Japan, especially when written records are often no longer available for modern historians.
“When it comes to human beings just being human beings, the world’s not as big as we think it is,” Kinsey says. “Looking back through history, there was a lot more interchange and sharing of cultural material, foods, customs, whatever, than we admit today a lot of times—simply because the records that would document that interchange have been lost.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/14/5a/145aa4d7-9b2e-4c0b-8257-9e235dd38493/f2021361a-w-2a-i_017-0.jpg)
One set of exhibition objects, a tea caddy, named Ueda Bunrin, with a silk storage bag and lacquer tray, embodies multiple (and sometimes forgotten) histories. The round, dark-colored tea caddy is named after the Japanese person who owned it during the Meiji period (1868-1912). But the object itself dates to the Chinese Song dynasty in the 13th century; it’s stored in a patchwork pouch made from Ming dynasty silks; and it was once in possession of Mount Koya’s Shintoku-in, a temple that burned down in 1776. Jung says that in the absence of permanent records, these objects can lead historians and curators to ask important questions.
“That temple is not necessarily known for being a center for tea,” she says. “It’s not necessarily associated with a famous tea practitioner, but what we understand is that it was part of this network, this community of people who practice tea. It seems like at some point, this tea caddy may have been at that Buddhist temple. Because it’s managed to retain all these accessories and it has that inscription, it’s an opportunity for us to maybe delve deeper and understand. Who are these people going to this Buddhist temple? Was there a monk collecting objects like this?”
Tea caddies can also point toward the sensibility of a Japanese collector: Jung says that a collector of the Ueda Bunrin object likely picked the red, chrysanthemum-style lacquer tray to contrast with the simplicity of the caddy itself. A collector’s taste can also be seen in the names of objects. A buncheong ware tea bowl, estimated to be from the 15th or 16th century, is named Naruto, after the famous Naruto Strait whirlpools, hallmarks of classical Japanese literature and poetry. The object also displays the Japanese technique of kintsugi, wherein lacquer, wheat paste and metallic powders are used to mend broken ceramic pieces, and become part of the object’s aesthetic.
One unique element of “Reasons to Gather” is that many objects are placed alongside the various boxes and protective wraps that have stored them for centuries. Museum conservator Akiko Niwa, who specializes in Japanese paintings, calls these containers “microclimate boxes,” which show how collectors took care of their objects even without contemporary tools.
“It’s very important to avoid the humidity inside,” Niwa says, adding that while there wasn’t necessarily a conservation perspective in ancient Japan, people were already aware of the importance of storage for objects.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ac/9b/ac9bc8a6-bb46-4cdb-8662-2259f59114a5/f201952a-i_008.jpg)
Niwa herself is a tea practitioner of over ten years. She became interested in chanoyu as a mounter, installing hanging scrolls, folding screens and hand scrolls throughout Japan. Because scrolls and Japanese paintings were related to tea culture, she found that getting involved in tea ceremonies helped her become a better mounter.
She explains that within tea culture, it’s often said that the hanging scroll is the most important object at a gathering. (Kinsey says that they’re often the most competitive objects to collect within the field.) One scroll, believed to be from the early 17th century, featured in the exhibition is Suigan Somin letter to Sen Sotan, the only documentary evidence of Sotan’s relationship to Chinese poetry, and Niwa notes on the exhibition display that the calligraphy uses “gold-stenciled gauze” and “gold brocades reminiscent of monks’ robes.”
The museum’s conservation and scientific research department also has a unique process of taking care of these kinds of objects. For hanging scrolls, creases are common because scrolls are always rolled up and down—but over time, creases can create tears. If the scrolls were mended in the past, people often used infilling paper to match the color of the original painting, but eventually the infilling paper will become a different color and no longer match. Within the conservation world, this is called an area of “loss.” In these instances, the museum staff will do their best not to completely fill in a “loss” area, but rather soften the damage done to the object.
“We do a full remounting treatment,” Niwa says. “It’s fixing the pigment or ink, also applying new infilling paper and, again, do an inpainting, but toning to match the color to the original painting. We don’t draw in the loss part, because we want to keep the condition the same as possible.”
This kind of conservation work is why Kinsey agreed to donate the materials to the museum in the first place. He’s retired from working and, because of osteoarthritis, can no longer sit at chanoyu ceremonies for extended periods of time. Although he spoke to other tea practitioner schools to see if they would be interested in the objects, these practitioners recommended that he donate the oldest objects for posterity.
“You’ve got to do the right thing by the art objects,” Kinsey says. “You got to keep in mind that you really aren’t the owner of them as much as you are the maintainer and conservator of them.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/20/1d/201d4b4c-0e3d-47b7-b034-0eecb6df58ea/20250115_japan_galleries_promo_003-0.jpg)
Jung says that attending tea ceremonies can give viewers an appreciation for chanoyu as a living practice. Many writers discuss tea ceremonies in terms of rituals or spirituality, making the process seem quite formal, she says, and yet the experience of attending a tea ceremony is communal. “It’s about bringing people together,” she says. “It’s about gathering people and being able to share space and share an experience, an intimate experience together.”
Still, Jung says she and other art historians might approach chanoyu from different perspectives compared with working tea practitioners. In her book Tea Culture of Japan, curator and scholar Sadako Ohki compares Sen Rikyu introducing “plebeian ceramics” to chanoyu in the 16th century with artist Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal as the work Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. According to Ohki, both were revolutionary interventions into an art establishment, expanding what was considered tasteful. Jung says she also sees parallels between the early stages of chanoyu in Japan and today’s art world, for example, finding an object from another culture “and then recontextualizing it, which is something you do see in contemporary art.”
Jung acknowledges that many contemporary tea practitioners might not agree with this viewpoint, since tea ceremonies are a centuries-old tradition that continues to be practiced. Still, Jung points to the “spirit of collaboration” in the origins of this tea practice in the 16th century, before it was codified, when early collectors would show their collections to people in their network to get their opinion.
Collaboration remains an important part of chanoyu for Kinsey. When thinking about how his view of the tea practice has changed over time, he says that he’s “much less of a snob about it,” encouraging everyone to consider watching or participating. He hopes that people can get something out of engaging with a tea ceremony, and that it sparks a curiosity to explore not just tea but all sorts of practices. For him, chanoyu is also a way of engaging with a long lineage of people that extends into both the past and the future.
When looking at the practice in context, “you’re really kind of having a conversation with people from centuries past,” Kinsey says. “Then, maybe we can think that these things will be useful to people who come after us, for the same purpose.”