CASHI

“Black Omen”

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[1st Term] Sat. 25 July – Sun. 16 August
[2nd Term] Thu. 27 August – Sun. 20 September
Artist: Kazuki UMEZAWA

CASHI is pleased to announce Kazuki Umezawa’s solo exhibition Black Omen at the gallery. Umezawa has created a unique pictorial surface using his bricolage-like method, collecting and reconstructing images diffused on the Internet.
This show is Umezawa’s first solo exhibition at CASHI in seven years since 2013’s Kazuki UMEZAWA Retrospective. During this time, he has evolved further, participating in group exhibitions at major museums in Japan and holding solo exhibitions overseas.
This time, Umezawa again confronts his fear of losing consciousness through dying, a long-time concern of his, and connects it with the image of black that he has been creating in recent years.
We will hold this exhibition in two parts to introduce Umezawa’s latest works. It opens on 25th July, when we welcome members of the public to visit.

Press Release(pdf:en)
Flyer Image(jpg:front)
Flyer Image(jpg:back)

Requests to visitors:
• Please refrain from visiting the gallery if you have a fever or cold symptoms.
• Please wear a mask and disinfect your hands with alcohol.
• Admission may be restricted if a large number of visitors come at once.
• Please keep a social distance from other visitors in the gallery.
• Please do not touch the art works.

The Pigments’ Progress
Arata HASEGAWA (Independent Curator)
PDF Download (Japanese)

Comments by the artist
Kazuki UMEZAWA

Characters don’t die, so I really envy them.
I will die someday, my consciousness will disappear, and that is the most dreadful thing of all. Isn’t it possible to perpetuate my consciousness?
Death: human beings have thought about it for a long time. There are various images through religions and philosophy. But they are only from people’s imaginations, and no one knows what will really happen when we die.
Expressing characters is a recent event in history. Even if history registers the slightest trace of a strange figurative expression, it’s a trivial point in the vastness of time and humanity, the earth, and the universe. I have been attached to such expressions, but my work and my life form a much smaller trace.
The age of the earth and the universe overwhelms the length of life. Does this consciousness feel darkness after death and continue to see it? If you see something beyond that darkness, it is not yourself, but images of characters. We see strange shapes that are copies of human beings, fragments of the characters we observed while we were alive. An image of them appearing in the darkness comes to my mind.
I connected the fear of losing consciousness through death with images that one may have after death and made them into new artworks. If there is a flood of images on the Internet that comes one after another in the process of dying, they are close to that.