キャラと瓦解の理想郷 (An ideal world of characters and debris)
Year: 2013
Medium: acrylic, glitter glue, oil marker, gesso, digital print, wood panel
Dimensions: 73 x 105 cm (28 3/4 x 41 3/8 in.)
Acquired from SBI Art Auction, 2022
Umezwa creates his works by collecting large amounts of images (mainly character images) on the internet to compose a collage-like style and layer paints over them. Parts of different characters are collected one by one carefully and are gathered to form an image of a single character as a whole. Umezawa and other artists applying digital images as a medium in the form of painting is an emerging generation with a background community creating internet memes through online drawing forums. The community continues the trend of otaku-style cultural background citation method to artworks that started from Takashi Murakami and Koudai Nakahara. In this work as well, Umezawa’s most characteristic expression of composing colors, layers, and space is seen by juxtaposing fragments of numerous existing characters like dots or image pixels.
