MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY is pleased to present “Exhibit 8 : Pieces of Narratives“, a solo exhibition by System of Culture, opening on November 12, 2025.

System of Culture (S.o.C), originally founded in 2017 as a collective of three artists, now continues its activities as the artistic name of Toshimitsu Komatsu.
S.o.C’s practice investigates the dynamics of contemporary society—where we are constantly exposed to an overwhelming flow of information and images through social media and AI—approaching it from a meta-perspective while positioning the work within the broader trajectory of art history.

S.o.C’s expression unfolds primarily through the medium of photography. Rather than capturing transient moments in a documentary or snapshot manner, each image is meticulously constructed through composition, lighting, and the selection of motifs, based on an elaborate conceptual framework.
From this process have emerged several distinct series—Still Life, The Setting Sun, and Landscape—each articulating its own visual philosophy.

Still Life, one of the artist’s signature projects, reinterprets the classical Western genre of still-life painting from a contemporary perspective. By symbolically inserting modern motifs into traditional compositions, the work seeks to reconnect painting and photography—two visual languages once divided by the invention of the camera.
In Landscape, S.o.C reconstructs new forms of scenery by merging multiple views to evoke the multi-layered perspectives characteristic of East Asian painting traditions. Meanwhile, The Setting Sun visualizes subtle bodily sensations—normally elusive in photographic representation—through a precise equilibrium between subject and conceptual framing.

The series Then, Passed Over introduces the notion of narratology into S.o.C’s practice. While the shooting process remains carefully orchestrated, the artist deliberately employs AI to select motifs and locations, partially removing personal intention and generating a collective narrative that transcends individual authorship.
Here, a series of anonymous and seemingly random images invites viewers to construct their own narratives—allowing unique personal stories to emerge from within each observer.

The new series Pieces of Narratives, presented in this exhibition, further develops the conceptual foundation of Then, Passed Over.
Consisting of 31 photographs, the work functions, in the artist’s words, as “a database of multi-image narratives—photographs that carry latent narrative possibilities.”
Fragments of random images are presented as narrative elements. By embedding narrative clues within the photographs and utilizing AI-based selection of motifs and locations, S.o.C creates a space of imaginative openness that extends beyond the artist’s own intention. The work thus operates as a device that activates latent narratives within the viewer.

Accompanying the exhibition, writer Awa Ito, neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano, and artist Rintaro Fuse have each selected several images from the 31 works and composed short texts inspired by their chosen photographs.
These texts form an integral part of the exhibition.
Through such multilayered mechanisms, the exhibition space becomes a site of interactive narratology—a thought experiment in which viewers decode the embedded visual codes and weave their own stories.