System of Culture: Pieces of Narratives

A new release by System of Culture, a Tokyo-based art collective that transcends the boundaries of existing photographic expression and pioneers new realms of contemporary art. This book, Pieces of Narratives, features 31 new works, along with three original short stories and two critical essays, all of them interwoven with the photographs.

The three short stories are written by contributors renowned in completely different fields: writer Awa Ito, neuroscientist Nobuko Nakano, and artist Rintaro Fuse.

The essays are written by Lukas Feireiss, a Berlin-based curator and writer, and Jin Qiuyu, a curator and photography specialist from Shanghai, China, who is based in Tokyo.

In conjunction with the release of the photobook, a solo exhibition, ‘Exhibit 8 Pieces of Narratives’, will be held at the contemporary art gallery ‘Maho Kubota Gallery’ in Jingumae, Shibuya Ward, in November 2025.

System of Culture
systemofculture.co

System of Culture was founded in 2017 as an art collective by three members. It now continues as the artist name of Toshimitsu Komatsu. Before forming the collective, Komatsu and his peers would meet almost weekly at a late-night family restaurant, casually talking about films, TV dramas, and social media posts. This led them to begin working out of a room in Komatsu’s family home, developing a practice based on still-life photography. Still life painting matured in 16th- and 17th-century Holland as an independent genre and was used as a site of experimentation in expression. System of Culture inherits this lineage, but approaches still life not only as a visual subject but as a framework for thought and cognition.

At the core of System of Culture’s practice are operations aimed at visualising and making concepts conscious. Photography, in this sense, is the trace of a process that is automatically drawn out from these operations. Komatsu received the Patricia Karallis Award at JAPAN PHOTO AWARD 2021, and was selected for VOCA 2022: The Vision of Contemporary Art – New Flat Artists at The Ueno Royal Museum. Major solo exhibitions include ‘Exhibit 4’ (2022, CALM&PUNK GALLERY) and ‘Exhibit 6’ (2024, parcel). In November 2025, Komatsu will present the solo exhibition ‘Exhibit 8 Pieces of Narratives’ at MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY. Publications include Book 1 (self-published, 2017) and Book 2 (self-published, 2024). In November 2025, the photobook Pieces of Narratives will be published by United Vagabonds.

Pages: 80
Dimensions: 257 x 364 mm
Format: Hardcover
Year: 2025
Language: English, Japanese
Editors: Masanobu Sugatsuke, Aleksandra Priimak
Text: Lukas Feireiss, Jin Qiuyu, Awa Ito, Nobuko Nakano, Rintaro Fuse
Design: Osamu Sakuma (Rondade)
Printing and binding: Live Art Books
Publisher: United Vagabonds