Ken Lum / Kenneth Robert Lum

Depicting the tension between personal experience and external classification, Ken Lum creates a complex body of work, searching for the right kind of expression in various media and different approaches, including performance, sculpture made of rented furniture, studio portrait photographs joined with false corporate logos, paintings of opaque language or mazes composed of mirrors inscribed with text. In each of these forms, he questions the systems that order our comprehension of the everyday world, often using manipulations to attract the attention in consumer culture. Going beyond the established conventions of portraiture, his work marks the individuals he depicts as subjects who strive to autonomy in the society that shapes their positions.

From Scientist to Prolific Artist

Born in 1956 in Vancouver, Canada, Lum gained his education at the University of Columbia where he received an MFA in 1985. Originating from China, his grandfather arrived in Canada in 1912, to work for the Pacific Railway Company. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture, and photography, Ken’s art ranges from Conceptual in orientation to the representational in character and is generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture, and spatial politics. Lum turned to Conceptual art after receiving his undergraduate degree in science. He believes that his lack of early formal art training enabled him to be more receptive to the influences of other Conceptual artists, such as Martha Rosler and Dan Graham. He asserts that, by the late twentieth century, concepts rather than the artist’s technical skill were most important in creating a work of art. Like many artists of his generation, he uses mass-produced consumer materials, blurring the boundary between art and popular culture^[1]. Rarely fabricating his own works, he instead cooperates with studio photographers and tradespeople on his projects. Using the combinations of photographic images and text, sculptural components, and ideas about language, the artist produces pieces that address contemporary life.

Ken Lum creates art concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture, and spatial politics

Questioning the Existence of Identity

His approach takes into consideration the individual’s place in society with the aim of investigating race and class distinctions. Lum strives to encourage the viewer to ask questions about social issues and the visual world. His life experience of Chinese Canadian living in East Vancouver has provided the material for most of his works which explore the issues of class, race, and identity. “Vancouver is the source of all my reflections. It’s not just a fountain of all my ideas, but it’s actually constantly feeding back towards my art. I think I make the work I do because I think about this city a lot.”^[2] Lum’s 30-year retrospective, held in Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011, included several installations using mirrors that refer to his so-called triangulation - a visitor is always projecting his or her own identity onto characters on a sign or poster. As a result, between expectations, projections and identification come to entangling. Focused on issues of identity, the artist emphasizes the element of empathy and alienation. He began his Photo-Mirror series in 1997. On the inside edge of each mirror’s frame, he placed photos of random people and scenes that became framed with the viewer who looks at his own reflection in the mirror, making the series of reflections seem endless.

His 30-year retrospective, held in Vancouver Art Gallery included Photo-Mirror series

Public Projects and Teaching Positions

Lum has worked on the number of public art projects in several cities around the world. There is no Place Like Home, centrally located in Vienna in 2000, generated controversy because he comprehended the work as the reaction to the growth of the extreme right in Europe. He made several pieces in Vancouver and Toronto, and in 2016 won the commission to create a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos Disaster in Cameroon. Lum’s work has been shown worldwide since late 1970’s, including solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Witte de With, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, which held a major retrospective in 2011. Among the prominent group exhibitions, he was a part of São Paulo Biennial (1998), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Venice Biennale (2001), Documenta 11 (2002), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), and the Gwangju Biennale (2008), Moscow Biennial (2011), and the Whitney Biennial (2014). He was a head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006.

Ken Lum currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

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Featured image: Ken Lum - Artist's portrait - Image via news.upenn.edu