While not well known in Japan, the titular mule is a hybrid breed of animal born from a male donkey and a female horse.
It lacks the standing and trade value of the horse, but comes with the economy and use value of the ass.
In the exhibition, the artist poses the question of what forms result and what new values are born when a mule is ‘broken,’ robbed of its original value as an optimal tool for productive labor.
This theme is explored through two bodies of work which both feature combinations- or cross breeding – of different mediums and processes.

Statement from artist

Broken Mule begins with the artist’s wish to explore value systems by authoring art objects from alienated and expended materials and images. Two new bodies of work perpetuate the artist’s interest in image as a container of value, investment of labour, relationship between materials and constellation of various contingencies.

More specifically, these new works embrace the images that arise through (re)employing, as binaries in their making, the contingencies of their materials and the directness of their industrial production. These (reconstructed) images stand at a distance from their original narratives, functions and authors.

As a result, they provoke a subtle shift in our perception of the contemporary media-scape and our understanding of an object’s value by calling into question: the mechanisms of communication; the material substructures that influence our understanding of images and objects; and the dynamic interplay of their means of production and distribution. Ultimately, the artist’s aim is to put in place an optical device – a reflective surface – that induces a contemplative scrutiny of the image object and of the underlying mechanics of its value structure.

Broken Mule explores the paradox of creating new value through the destruction and reconstruction of existing images and materials. It comprises two new bodies of work, both photographic, of which one is wall bound, the other sculptural.

*image (left)
© Hugh Scott-Douglas
courtesy of the artist and Kaikai Kiki Gallery