Cedar Blend Line is a gallery in Kyoto's Higashiyama district showing works by emerging and mid-career artists who work with wood, lacquer, paper, and pigment. We keep the program small so each show gets the attention it deserves.
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.
Four shows per year, never more, so each one gets full attention
Every work sold includes a hand-typed certificate and studio photograph
Private viewings reserved for Tuesday mornings and the first Sunday of each month
The gallery space is a 1920s machiya with the original cedar ceiling intact
Haruki Nishimura spent eight years as a curator at the National Museum of Modern Art in Osaka before opening here
— David Mercer
Where Japanese craft and contemporary vision meet
Plan Your VisitUrushi is the sap of the Toxicodendron vernicifluum tree, harvested by hand in small quantities from trees that take a decade to mature. It has been used in Japan for at least 9,000 years, and for most of that time it was applied to functional objects: bowls, boxes, furniture, armour. Contemporary artists working with urushi are doing something different. They are using the material's depth, its slow cure, and its sensitivity to humidity as expressive tools rather than protective coatings.
Read more →Kyoto has a lot of galleries. Some are attached to craft shops and sell decorative objects with a loose relationship to contemporary art. Some are serious programme spaces showing work that will still matter in twenty years. The difference is not always obvious from the outside, and the language barrier can make it harder to ask the right questions. This is a practical guide for first-time buyers, based on what we have seen work and not work over nine years of running Cedar Blend Line.
Read more →Most people who buy a work on paper do not think much about the paper itself. They look at the image, the ink, the composition. But the paper is doing a lot of work. It absorbs differently, ages differently, and responds to humidity and light in ways that affect how the work looks over decades. For artists working in ink and pigment in Japan, the choice of paper is not a background decision.
Read more →We run a single exhibition per season, never overlapping. Every artist gets the full floor, full lighting rig, and our undivided attention for the duration of the run.
Our program leans toward artists who work with physical material. Handmade washi, kiln-fired cedar panels, urushi lacquer on hinoki. We are not a digital-print gallery.
We introduce serious buyers directly to the artist. No intermediary layer, no auction-house markup. The conversation happens in the gallery over tea, not over email.
Every work sold through Cedar Blend Line comes with a hand-typed certificate of authenticity, a studio photograph, and a short written account of the work's making.
Tuesday mornings and the first Sunday of each month are reserved for private viewings. Bring a question, bring a friend, bring nothing. We will have tea ready.
No booking needed for general admission during regular hours, Wednesday through Sunday, 11:00 to 18:00. If you want a private viewing with time to ask questions and sit with the work, those are on Tuesday mornings and the first Sunday of each month. For those, please email us a few days in advance so we can have the space ready.
You can ask in the gallery, or email us at hello@cedarblendline.com with the work you are interested in. We will send you a full description, dimensions, and provenance sheet. Payment is by bank transfer. We do not process card payments in the gallery, though we are working on that.
Yes. We pack every work ourselves in paulownia wood boxes with acid-free tissue and double-walled corrugated board. Shipping to Europe typically takes two to three weeks. We use Yamato Transport for domestic and a specialist art courier for international. Costs depend on size and destination, and we will quote you before anything is confirmed.