I wanted to show work while the artist was still in the middle of making it.
Haruki Nishimura opened Cedar Blend Line in the spring of 2017 in a converted machiya townhouse on Ninenzaka, a narrow stone-paved lane in Kyoto's Higashiyama ward. He had spent the previous eight years working as a junior curator at the National Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, cataloguing the postwar Mono-ha collection and writing acquisition proposals that mostly got shelved. The work was careful and slow, and he learned a great deal from it, but the museum's acquisition cycle ran on a five-year lag. By the time a living artist's work reached the walls, the conversation around it had already moved on. He wanted to show work while the artist was still in the middle of making it.
The name came from a material, not a metaphor. The original gallery space had a ceiling of rough-sawn cedar planks that the previous tenant, a textile restorer named Fujiwara-san, had installed in the 1980s. The smell of the wood was the first thing visitors noticed. Haruki kept the ceiling, added a single track of warm LED lighting, and painted the walls a very pale grey that reads almost white in afternoon light. The first show, in May 2017, was a series of ink-on-washi works by Kanazawa-based artist Yuki Tanabe. All seven pieces sold within the first two weeks. That was not the plan, but it told him something about the appetite for work that was genuinely made by hand in Japan, shown without the usual institutional distance.
