Kota Ezawa’s work references images in popular culture, cinema, television, and art history. Through such media as digital animation, slide projections, paper cut-outs, watercolor, light boxes and collage, he recontextualizes and distills these iconic images to their most essential form. By doing so, his work communicates the symbolic power these images have on the collective psyche and underscores a keen understanding of how images shape our experience and memory of events.

Kota Ezawa lives and works in San Francisco, California. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); and Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006). He has participated in group exhibitions such as Screen Play: Life in an Animated World, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2015); Out of the Ordinary, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2013); After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); and HERE., Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2011). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY;  San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, among others.