Due to her late introduction into the medium, she felt that she needed to ‘catch up’ to other photographers and rented a space in Tokyo and began to produce one new exhibition every month from 2010 to 2011.
Komatsu states that many of the photographs of industrial sites for this exhibition were taken during the COVID-19 pandemic which coincided with a construction boom in Japan leading up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
I thought the process was very similar to cutting out texts from a book and putting them into an object, in this installation, a bottle.” [7] In Komatsu's monograph, Creative Destruction, published for her exhibition at the David Museum's Morelle Lasky Levine ’56 Works on Paper Gallery at Wellesley College,[8] photography curator Carrie Cushman argues that Komatsu is part of the tradition of Japanese street photography’s prolific production of photographs.
Her usage of uncut rolls of photographs of urban scenes hanging from the ceiling or exhibited half unfurled and her use of projectors call into question the materiality of the medium of photography itself through a multisensory immersive experience.
[9] Cushman uses Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacob’s book Buildings Must Die to analyze Komatsu’s choice of motif, construction sites and the inherent connection between creation and destruction in late stage capitalism.
Cushman argues that the lack of chronology in Komatsu's work deconstructs the temporality of the industrial sites, compressing them into a “coexistence of multiple experience of time in a single space.”[9] In another essay published in the same book, Creative Destruction, Franz Prichard argues that sheer volume of photographs and other forms of media in Komatsu's installations renders the word “viewing” insufficient to capture the experience of the people who visit her exhibitions.
He suggests that an “aesthetics of overload” is a more sufficient term, drawing parallels to Komatsu's formative experiences in experimental noise music and the positive feedback loops utilized in that medium.
Prichard argues that Komatsu's meaning making comes from the “amplification of photochemical processes and materials,” which is also a metaphor that resonates with experimental noise music.
[9] Her works are included in collections at The Mast Foundation in Bologna, Tate Modern in London, the Kawasaki City Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the New York Public Library.