In the season finale of Art &, we meet Hideo Mabuchi—a quantum physicist, ceramicist, and faculty director of the Stanford Arts Institute—whose creative and scholarly life models what it looks like to teach and research from a place of integration. For Hideo, art and science are not opposites, but complementary ways of thinking, making, and discovering.
In this conversation with host Ellen Oh, Hideo shares how an encounter with Japanese ceramics led to a years-long journey of incorporating material practice into his research and teaching. From firing clay in a wood-burning kiln to running interdisciplinary courses on indigo dye, his work invites students—and fellow faculty—to explore the world through many lenses at once.
Together, Hideo and Ellen reflect on the growing appetite for interdisciplinarity among students, and how faculty can help create space for that complexity. As we imagine new ways of structuring research and teaching, Hideo’s story points to a hopeful future—where art plays a foundational role in helping us ask better questions, expand our methods, and deepen the meaning of our work.
Featured Guest: Hideo Mabuchi
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Credits
Host: Ellen Oh
Creator/Producer/Editor: Taylor Jones
Production Support: Edi Dai
Sound Designer and Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme song and Music: Juana Izuzquiza
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko
Special thanks to Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts
Hello and welcome to Art & – a show from Stanford Arts.
On today’s episode, the last of our season, we meet a physicist who’s also a ceramicist—and who sees no contradiction in embodying both of those roles.
Hideo Mabuchi: Developing that ability to recognize when you're maybe asking the wrong question or when you formulated the wrong problem and seeing how, by shifting the way that you're thinking about it, asking a slightly different question or just coming at the whole scenario from a different angle. That's the kind of thing that artists get good at doing.
Hideo Mabuchi is a professor of Applied Physics, a practicing ceramicist, and the faculty director of the Stanford Arts Institute. He’s also Chair of the Breadth Governance Board, a group that helps shape the undergraduate experience at the university. But beyond these roles, Hideo is a model for what it can look like when research and art are not separate pursuits, but part of a shared creative life.
Whether he’s investigating quantum systems or firing ceramics in a wood-burning kiln, Hideo brings a deep attentiveness to process, form, and discovery. His courses don’t treat the arts and sciences as separate spheres, but as mutually enriching ways of asking questions and making meaning.
At Stanford, Hideo is helping to seed a cultural shift—where faculty are empowered to teach from their full selves, and where students aren’t forced to choose between technical excellence and creative practice.
In our conversation, we talked about learning through failure, designing interdisciplinary classrooms, and why it’s time to normalize being a scientist and an artist on campus.
So with that, here’s our conversation with Hideo Mabuchi.
Ellen Oh (03:43): Can you tell me how you got started making ceramics? What drew you to that?
Hideo Mabuchi (03:50): Yeah, I haven't been doing it for that long. In a sense, it's been maybe 14 or 15 years, and I didn't really do any kind of visual art or plastic art when I was a kid.
There was a particular business trip that I took for physics. I was in Tokyo and just one a night before I left, I was out to dinner and at the dinner service, if you order sake or something like that, it doesn't come out with glasses and glass bottles. They bring out this little tray of ceramic cups for you to choose from, and also your kind of portion of sake comes out in a ceramic container. And I just thought that there was really neat material culture, and so that kicked me off on a little period of collecting traditional Japanese ceramics. And then just totally out of the blue one day I thought, oh, I wonder what, maybe I'll try making something and maybe that will help me understand this medium better. But I very quickly got hooked on that. First, I just got hooked on throwing clay on a wheel. It was early in my days as department chair, and it just was in a very kind of thinky place and needed something much more hands-on and embodied to do so it was a really nice other thing to have that I was into that I could kind of escape into a little bit.
After a few years, I started wood firing the ceramics that I was making. That's what got me permanently hooked, I think, because first of all, I knew I liked the look of those finished surfaces, but also to have the experience of putting unglazed clay, which looks really super boring, into a wood-burning kiln. Then a few days later, after or a week later after everything is done, to see them come out with this incredible range of colors and textures on the surface, and just understanding that all of that happens because of some physics and chemistry of interaction between the elements in the clay itself and the complex atmosphere in a wood-burning kiln. That kind of lit up some physics neurons or something like that.
Ellen Oh (08:14): You were talking about the little cups that come with sake, and when I think of ceramics, I think of perfectly sculpted little bowls and pots that you do on a wheel, and the point is to make them very smooth and symmetrical. And then I saw your work, and a lot of it is intentionally very not smooth and symmetrical.
Hideo Mabuchi (08:46): When I'm teaching ceramics, I'll often say something like this that, yeah, you make things as you go. You kind of have to make things in order to get better. But the real kind of point of working in a medium like ceramics for me is that over long periods of time, decades, you're just developing a deeper relationship with the material.
You're really getting to understand clay, the kinds of things that clay wants to do, both when it's soft on the wheel or in your hands or whatever, and the way that it behaves when you fire it in different ways. Just gradually as you work with it, you discover these things that clay likes to do on its own.
That's not about perfect symmetry or smooth surfaces or things. It's more like the kinds of behavior that any earthen material has. And to me, those are the things that I hope to bring out into work. Much like many poets will say, the best thing is when I'm surprised by what comes out or the way that things turn out, as opposed to just being able to say, yes, this is exactly what I was intending to do.
Ellen Oh (10:28): It's more expressive, I think, in many ways. What about failure? Would you say that is just part of the process or can it be helpful or enriching in some way?
Hideo Mabuchi (47:18): Maybe it's my training as a scientist, but I like to think of everything as an experiment. Teaching a new class is an experiment, and it's almost not worth doing unless there's a chance that it could fail. You're not taking on enough in a new class unless there's a possibility that it could fail.
I think really once you've been working in scientific research for a while, the real scientific method is that based on your intuition, you guess something that would be really great if it were true. And then you use either laboratory experiments or mathematical derivations to try to convince yourself and other people that it either is or isn't true.
And in fact, the most important cases are the ones in which you convince yourself that your guess was not true, because that's your opportunity to improve your intuition. So it really, it's those failed cases where you really learn something.
I think making objects is very similar, that you're trying to feel your way towards forms that you like, that you feel that are personally expressive in a way that you want them to be. And you try a lot of stuff. And when you try things that it seemed like a good idea, but it really wasn't. That's your opportunity to refine your intuition about forms. If you're not failing with a lot of the things that you make, you're not pushing the envelope with the teaching.
Ellen Oh (49:41): And I love that approach. I think I'm going to adopt that approach. So knowing that failure is a good thing, approaching things with the ability to accept the risk, and then maybe I can just call myself a scientist.
Hideo Mabuchi: Sure.
Ellen Oh (11:08): When you had that moment of the spark when you fired the ceramics in the wood kiln and you realized that it actually lit up the other side of your brain and your physics brain, was that the point that you started thinking about how can I bring this artistic practice into my teaching and or research at Stanford?
Hideo Mabuchi (11:47): I didn't know that it happened in that moment, but that's definitely where that moment led. Like any good scientist, I think my first step was to go to the literature in material science, just to just see if anybody had really studied what were the processes, what were the mechanisms by which these colors and textures get generated. And there's a little bit there. The most relevant things that I found were from a Japanese group of chemists and material scientists working in a university near one of the traditional ceramics regions in Japan. So I read up on what they were doing, and my first step was to see, oh, can I reproduce some of these studies at Stanford because I knew that we had the right kind of scientific equipment around, but actually in my research group's work, we never had any reason to use that particular instrumentation. But here I was with a new just kind of personal motivation to learn how to use it. I started first doing some reproductions and then trying to do similar studies on different color phenomena that I had become interested in.
Eventually the thinking turned into how to incorporate that into teaching. And I guess that was really the first time that I turned to even thinking about, oh, well, what if I could teach a class where students were both making ceramics in a studio, but we also were talking about some of this interesting material science and some of these processes. That kicked off kind of what has become almost the only way that I teach now at Stanford of trying to conceive of and offer courses that bridge STEM fields with the arts and humanities in some way. Sometimes with students making things, sometimes just with object studies or sometimes just using art objects or art materials as kind of a hub, and then looking at them from a wide variety of different disciplinary perspectives just to see how all that fits together.
Ellen Oh (14:25): Did you find that that was hard to navigate or make that happen? Where do these courses live? In which department? Are they cross-listed? Were they recognized as physics classes and what students gravitated towards these classes? I feel like for some it might be hard to understand or a hard sell because it's such a different kind of approach.
Hideo Mabuchi (14:53): My faculty appointment is in the Department of Applied Physics, and we're relatively unusual at Stanford in that we're one of the few departments that doesn't service an undergraduate concentration. And we don't have a lot of teaching that we're obligated to do even for the PhD program. We basically have freedom to teach more or less what we want to. I approached it kind of like I approach anything in science research. I just kind of went in on an instinctive basis and tried to feel my way through how to do it.
Ellen Oh (16:17): But that's also the scientific approach, isn't it?
Hideo Mabuchi (16:19): Yeah.
Ellen Oh (16:19): You iterate and you ask a question, you have a hypothesis, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but then you can shift what's necessary. So I remember hearing a while back about the indigo class that you taught. You grew indigo at the farm. How did you tie that back into physics?
Hideo Mabuchi (18:00): The indigo class, I think is my favorite example of something where there was kind of an art process at the center, but I really tried to use it to stitch together as many different kind of disciplinary angles as I could.
Hideo Mabuchi (20:00): First of all, it was a small class. It was run as an in intro em, it was a sophomore seminar. But I did have students from kind of all over.
And every day was different. Some days we're really hands in the vat kind of doing that dying. Other days, we were mostly talking about readings that had been assigned, or we had some visitors come in via, came in and talked to us about secondary metabolism in plants. We looked at a lot of examples of traditionally indigo diet fabric from different traditions. So I feel like the main pedagogical hook was we started with the really fun stuff. We started putting plants in the ground and we started dying with indigo, which is kind of a magic, another visceral thing, just in the sense that when your indigo vat is in a state to dye textiles, it's not blue.
It's this horrible mucky green brown color because you have to chemically reduce indigo in order for it to be water soluble. So then you kind of submerse your fabric in this weird gunky mess, but then as you bring it out into the air, it gradually oxidizes over the course of a few minutes and kind of magically turns blue. So I think those sorts of experiences where you get students to care about something, right, they're kind of interested because of this very direct embodied experience of working with indigo, understanding something about its kind of deep roots in time and culture, and then that's the motivation for them to be interested in learning some of these other things. We got pretty techie in some of the classes. I talked a little bit about in an art conservation context, if you're looking at a blue pigment, how can you tell whether that's indigo or something else? We talked about Raman spectroscopy and energy disperses spectroscopy, but it was, I think students had a reason to be interested in it, and just because it was immaterial, it was a topic that they already were convinced that they were interested in.
Hideo Mabuchi (18:15): So yeah we were getting to know indigo as a plant, watching it grow at the farm, weeding, but then we were harvesting fresh indigo leaves to do some fresh leaf indigo dying. We also went through the very labor intensive process of extracting stable blue pigment from indigo leaves that we had harvested. We kind of learned something about indigenous traditions of dying with indigo from all over the world, which was independently invented by a number of different people using actually different plants in different places.
But then if you're going to talk about histories in indigo, you have to talk about indigo as a cash crop, as a major driver of enslaved labor in the Carolinas during the American colonial period. Also the British mercantile system, South Asia, the blue revolt.`
And then I learned this incredible thing in researching for the class that if you crystallize indigo, it's a semiconductor. The goal was to really try to leave students by the end of the quarter, feeling like if we hadn't looked into all these different disciplinary facets, you wouldn't really know about indigo. I just like that as a kind of an attempt to resuscitate the whole idea of liberal education and this idea that you want to take all of these different views in order to really understand anything.
Ellen Oh (22:09): I wish you would teach that class again, just so I can audit it.
Ellen Oh: I think what you were describing about the class really does speak to your typical Stanford student. It seems like every student here is a multi-disciplinarian and is interested in approaching questions and problems from multiple angles. There are so many interests and skills in each person that they gravitate towards this kind of thinking and doing.
Hideo Mabuchi (26:58): I've really started, I mean, the other thing I've started to appreciate is that both among graduate students and undergraduates, there's some really accomplished artists who come to Stanford, and many, if not most of them, are not majoring in art practice. Among the undergrads, especially either because the students and or their parents feel like it's better for them to major in computer science or data science or something like that. But they're incredible artists. And so I think a lot of our job in the VPA organization is to encourage those students and help them not give that up and to just keep doing that alongside whatever else they're doing with their time here at Stanford.
Ellen Oh (27:34): Yeah, it's only going to help both practices, I think. And you never know where the sparks where they're going to be, intersections, magical intersections. So are you seeing other faculty members doing this kind of work or teaching or expressing interest in wanting to do to bring creative practices into the classroom?
Hideo Mabuchi (28:10): When it comes to teaching at Stanford. Everybody has their own constraints that come from their department or other things like that. But our friend, Manu Prakash, he certainly is exploring more and more, trying to teach courses where the intended audience spans across science and the arts. There are some very talented artists in biology and psychology, they're working with some of their graduate students or maybe encouraging some of their graduate students to also keep up their creative practices.
And I know there's interest in a number of departments in the question of how graduate students can actually incorporate a creative component as an official part of their graduate work, whether or not it formally makes it into the thesis, per se, how to kind of structure things so that they can feel like it's something that they get credit for, or something that they're not doing just on the side. So it’s gradual. It takes a little while to find all the people around campus who have a kind of commitment to supporting this sort of work, but we're growing our network of people of that kind.
Ellen Oh (29:34): I think it's also important, as you mentioned, to see where the opportunities could exist to create systems or platforms or structures so that this kind of work can happen not just for graduate students, but for faculty to also learn how to teach in interdisciplinary ways and bring their own artistic practices into their research. Can you think of any other ways that we can encourage that?
Hideo Mabuchi (30:13): I always think of our long-term goal. What both of us are doing is we're trying to shift the culture at campus to make that sort of thing just more normal. If you're interested in doing that kind of thing, why wouldn't you do it? And part of that I think, is just surfacing the community of people who lean in that direction, getting everybody to know each other and feel like there's a supportive group of peers that you have to talk about the crazy ideas that you might be interested in.
I do think it's important to try to develop strategies… there are a lot of people who actually, their teaching may be dictated by their department, or they don't have for the reason. They don't really feel like they have the freedom to experiment with teaching courses of the kinds that I've been talking about, say.
But a lot of the idea of this is, well, the arts are so broad that you can imagine integrating them in an interdisciplinary way into any course that you're assigned to teach, you just have to be a little bit creative about it, be clearer about your pedagogical goals. What do you want the students to get out of this arts experience in your class? You know, I think that's something where getting groups of faculty together who are interested in that to talk about strategies, obstacles, what has worked, what hasn't worked to workshop ideas about these kinds of courses, and just sort of talk them through together.
I think over time, you want to first find that community and then help that community build the culture. And building a culture in the academic sense a lot means bringing together good ideas collectively, coming to decisions about what are better ways and what are maybe rays to pursue things. And just accumulating a bunch of successful examples that are motivations for people to do their own innovating. It's gradual. I think it's something that needs to remain diffused into all of the work that everybody's already doing for whatever other reasons. But yeah, I think we're starting to see some progress,
Ellen Oh (32:21): And I think that showing and demonstrating what is possible and different ways to do it is also really important. So hopefully this community can grow and expand. So you've said you've been doing this work for about 10 years. As you project into the future, what do you hope that the campus culture will look like? What do you hope the campus culture will look like in 10 years? In another 10 years?
Hideo Mabuchi (32:52): I'll try to be somewhat realistic, but maybe ambitious. One thing that's been interesting about stepping into this role as a faculty director of the Stanford Arts Institute, I'm the first scientist to be in that position, and I've done some things like this of talking about my perspective on let's say art and science and just that little bit of publicity that's made it so that I get kind of a steady trickle of students wanting to talk who maybe are science students, and they kind of want to know how can they find a way to also keep up with their art practice and what they're doing as a scientist. And some of them have mentioned things like, they’re a student working on something very serious of an artistic nature, but they kind of feel like they shouldn't really talk about it in an academic setting. They don't necessarily tell all their friends about it. And that's something that I really hope will go. I hope that will go away, both for students and for faculty. I mean, I would hope that within 10 years we could get to a place where it's totally normal that somebody, whether they're pursuing a PhD in physics or biology or whatever, that spending some time pursuing a creative practice, of course, that's something that you would do.
Ellen Oh (34:15): It's normalized.
Hideo Mabuchi (34:16): It's normalized. I've been trying out the idea recently that we want to get to a place where we think about artistic inquiry and artistic creativity as being kind of like mathematics. There's a department of math, but almost every department uses math in some aspect of what they do. And so of course, you would want to develop your math skills if you're an economist or a linguist or whatever. It's normalized. And so I would hope that our practice would be something kind of along those lines that no matter what you're doing on your career trajectory, that having that artistic capacity, something that's going to enhance what you do, just broaden your values, change your perspective on what you want to accomplish with your life. I don't know exactly what that means institutionally, but I hope that if our community of interested people keep pushing, that's the kind of place that we're trying to get to on that decade sort of scale.
Ellen Oh: What does interdisciplinary work mean for you at this moment, and what does the culture shift within academia you’ve been talking about actually look like in practice?
Hideo Mabuchi (38:13): It's interesting to think about how we got to the current structure of the academic institution, which is very disciplinary. We can say that it's siloed, but maybe a different way just to view it is that… anybody who thinks of themselves as an academic, I think they want to think of as doing something very rigorous and very deep in some way. That they're not just dabbling, and it's not just that they have topics that they're interested in, but that they've mastered some body of prior work and they're really trying to push the envelope forward in a way, that's very focused. And that gets the institution to a certain place.
I think with the kinds of issues that we're looking at these days, both from how the public thinks about higher education to the issues surrounding sustainability, or how does higher education… how does the workforce evolve in response to the sudden onset of artificial intelligence… Those are all really complicated things. And I think we have gotten used to, especially in STEM fields, the idea that we can always break down complicated situations into focused problems and really target those problems in a very focused way. But I don't know that the world's going to continue to be like that. We're just going to have this complicated mush of stuff.
being able to ask the right sort of crosscutting questions where you really feel like you make progress on something, even if you're not solving anything. Feeling like you have a better handle on the complex situation, that sort of skill is inherently interdisciplinary. I think it's the kind of thing that a training in the humanities prepares you for much better than a typical training in the sciences. Just developing that ability to recognize when you're maybe asking the wrong question or when you formulated the wrong problem and seeing how, by shifting the way that you're thinking about it, asking a slightly different question or just coming at the whole scenario from a different angle. That's the kind of thing that artists get good at doing.
Reviving that as a value that we have in higher education, I think is really important going forward. And so I think that just says that we're at a moment in higher education where we need to kind of recover that whole idea of liberal education and make it more central again, to what we're doing as educators.
Ellen Oh: I totally agree. I hope that this interdisciplinary work we are both doing can help move us in that direction. Thank you so much for this conversation.
As we look toward the future, I hope these conversations have sparked inspiration for others to weave arts into their research and practice. I want to see interdisciplinary collaborations and integrations of art in every other field of inquiry.
Art can help us ask new questions, it can communicate big ideas, and inspire meaningful change. Art is essential.
I’m looking forward to some exciting projects next year involving ceramics and civic dialogue; astrophysics and digital art; and fermentation and food innovation.
This summer, we’ll be releasing a survey to get your thoughts and feedback on this season of Art &. We also want to invite our listeners and community members who are interested in this work to reach out and explore ways to partner with us.
Subscribe to Art & wherever you listen to podcasts for future episodes and more stories. And follow Stanford Arts on social media for more updates. Thanks for listening.
From Stanford Arts, this is Art &.
Ellen Oh is our host. The show is produced and edited by me, Taylor Jones, with additional production support by Edi Dai.
Chase Everett is our sound designer and mixing engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Izuzquiza.
Series artwork is by Connie Ko.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Special thanks to Hideo Mabuchi, Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts, and Stanford Live.
Art & is recorded at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University.