Born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan in 1985. Graduated from the Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences of Musashino Art University in 2008. Umezawa creates landscape and portrait-like works by collecting various character images from the internet, fragmenting, and reconstructing them. Although he uses body parts of the characters and divides them into small pieces as minimum elements, the attributes of their arms, hairs or eyes are barely retained. Compressing and overlapping these elements with an abnormal density creates a landscape symbolizing the information overload on the internet space, and this very creation distinguishes Umezawa from other artists. His work does not focus on the individual part but presents the total space as a whole. Umezawa’s obsessive collectivity can also be interpreted as a collapsing vector. After witnessing the destruction caused by the East Japan Earthquake in 2011, he has been integrating photographic images of the disaster area into his work. It is very typical of Umezawa not to bring the rubble itself into the picture but just the image of it. He brings the very physical, hands-on techniques of collage or assemblage into the digital space. However, while being virtual, the digital space separated from reality is also a “space”, making it possible to state that the objects placed there are close to be in three dimensions. In fact, there is no choice but to confine it on the canvas at the present time in order to make its ideal form to exist as a painting. Traces of struggle of unable to escape from the materiality of painting seems to appear in the “paints” added with fingers and brushes on the output image.
Umezawa has participated in numerous exhibitions both in Japan and abroad. He also was a former member of “CHAOS*LOUNGE”, a group of artists with activities symbolizing the 2000’s, playing a central role in their images. Umezawa was awarded the Prize for Excellence at “VOCA Exhibition 2018” (The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan) and his works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan).