How do we even exist within systems that feel immovable? What does it mean to be consumed by work? How do we navigate structures that demand everything while offering little in return? This exhibition emerges from those questions, that have been with us for some time, quietly shaping our days, our decisions, our exhaustion.

We look to the figure of the Japanese salaryman and the legacy of the zaibatsu, subjects of corporate devotion, as mirrors for a global condition. The zaibatsu, pre-war industrial conglomerates, helped normalise corporate loyalty as a defining social value. The corporation emerges as an unstoppable force, hollowing out the worker while presenting itself as the only way forward. We recognise this not as theory, but as daily reality, life lived in default. Default speaks to a subtle kind of control, the settings we rarely question, the systems we inherit rather than choose. We move through these structures each day, shaped by routines and expectations that feel inevitable, even natural. Casual spontaneity is ruled out. The rhythm of life becomes a closed loop, predetermined, efficient, and dull. One reference point for us is the phrase 月月火水木金金, Monday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Friday, a militarised work ethic adopted during wartime Japan and echoed now in countless schedules, and internalised expectations. A week with no Saturday and no Sunday. Rest removed by design.

This exhibition offers a series of images captured during after-work meals with colleagues, a daily occurrence, part ritual, part release. The conversations stretch long into the night, but even these moments of reprieve are framed by exhaustion, by shared weariness, by the residue of the workday still clinging to our bodies. These images don’t provide relief; they are extensions of the day, tired faces under harsh lighting, laughter stretched thin by fatigue. We have transported part of our office space into the grounds of MATERIAL, blurring boundaries between work and exhibition, between labour and display. Carpet, sofa, ephemera, fragments of the environment we inhabit daily, are relocated, but the logic remains intact.
The toll is not always dramatic. It accumulates. It is seen in the flattening of the self under pressure to perform, to endure, to comply. It’s felt in the persistent ache behind the eyes, in the heaviness that settles in after too many 12-hour days. The idea of being worked to death rarely announces itself, it unfolds slowly, in burnout, in detachment, in the quiet undoing of identity. This exhibition doesn’t seek to resolve these tensions. Instead, it holds space for the discomfort, the repetition, and the offensiveness of life within corporate systems, where perseverance is expected, and to question the norm becomes a disruption.

A life where to endure is to comply, and to comply is to be consumed.

Lark Ring and Taiga Nakazaki