Ken Lum

Ken Lum (born 1956) is a Canadian artist of Chinese heritage who lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. [http://www.andrearosengallery.com/files/39ec4b13.pdf] Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art is conceptually oriented, and generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language and portraiture. Lum's family established roots in Canada in 1908 through his grandfather, Lum Nin, who arrived as a labourer for the Canadian Pacific Railway company. Lum grew up in Strathcona neighborhood and later Vancouver Kingsway in East Vancouver.

He was Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art from 2000 to 2006 at the University of British Columbia, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts in 2005 and worked at Bard until 2007. He was for two years invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Lum guest taught at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich, the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, China, and the l'Ecole d'Arts Plastique in Fort de France, Martinique. Lum won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. While at the University of British Columbia, he was awarded the Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998. In 2003, Lum garnered the Distinguished University Professor Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative and Performing Art in 2003. He was awarded a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007. He represented Canada at the Sydney Biennale in 1995, the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1997, the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, and at Documenta XI in 2002. More recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial 2006, Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing), and Istanbul Biennial 2007. He will also exhibit in the Gwangju Biennale 2008 to take place in Gwangju, South Korea.

From 1999 to 2001, Lum wrote an online journal for [http://www.londonart.co.uk LondonArt] , which chronicled both his passion for and misgivings about art. He co-founded Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art in 2000, along with Zheng Shengtian, and was Editor-in-Chief until 2004. In August 2006, Lum was keynote speaker opening the 3rd and final symposium of the 15th Biennale of Sydney. He has written several catalog essays with themes ranging from the relationship of art to ethnology for the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, The Netherlands, to the art of Chen Zhen for the Vienna Kunsthalle. Other essays include a historical analysis of Canadian Cultural Policy, and one concerning issues of multiple identities in respect to Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, a paper which was presented to the Department of Caribbean Studies at Yale University.

Lum was Project Manager for "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 to 1994," an exhibition conceived and curated by Okwui Enwezor. Lum was curator of the 2004 NorthWest Annual for the Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle. In 2005, Lum co-curated Shanghai Modern 1919-1945 [http://www.booktopia.com.au/shanghai-modern-1919-1945/prod9783775714976.html] , an exhibition about the city's art and culture during the republican era. The same year, he also co-curated the 7th Sharjah Biennial in The Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the largest international contemporary art bienniale in the Middle East. Lum was a board member of the Annie Wong Art Foundation of Hong Kong from 1998 to 2002. In 2003, Lum was a juror for the Prix de Rome Prize in the category of Art in Public Space for the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam. He also wrote the essay for the publication accompanying the prize. In 2008, Lum was a juror for the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards conducted in Beijing and juror for the Bloomberg Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London, UK.

Lum has worked on several public art projects. In Vienna in 2000, Lum realized a 540 square metre work on the side of the centrally located Vienna Kunsthalle. The work, "There is no place like home," generated controversy as Lum saw the work as a response to the growth of the extreme right in Europe. Lum's "Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White" was installed upon the roof of the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2001. The work, which can be viewed as a comment on immigration and acculturation, features four model boats: a First Nations longboat, a cargo ship, the steam liner "Komagata Maru", and George Vancouver's ship HMS "Discovery". Each vessel has been placed at one of the building's compass points — north, south, east, and west — and painted in a colour intended to reflect the stereotyped racial vision presented in the hymn "Jesus Loves the Little Children". [O'Brian, Melanie. (2001). "Ken Lum: Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White." [Brochure] . Vancouver, British Columbia: Vancouver Art Gallery.]

Lum realized a second permanent public art commission outside St. Moritz [www.publicplaiv.ch/assets/pdf/staelum.pdf] , Switzerland in 2004. Another major public art commission by Lum, sponsored by he city of Vienna, Austria, and Wiener Linien (Vienna Public Transit), opened in downtown Vienna. Opened January, 2007, the work is titled Pi [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(Karlsplatz)] and is situated over the course of a 130 meter long pedestrian passageway at Karlsplatz's West Passage. Lum is presently working on a fourth permanent public art commission due to open in 2010 from the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands for the Nieuw Welgelegen district, a troubled but dynamic multi-ethnic area that is undergoing redevelopment.

References