Ken Lum
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Ken Lum (b. 1956) is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. [1] Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art is conceptually oriented, and generally concerned with issues of identity through the categories of language and portraiture.
Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art at the University of British Columbia, where he taught from 1990 until 2006, Lum joined the faculty of Bard College's Milton Avery School in 2005. He has also guest taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, 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, and both the Distinguished University Professor Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative and Performing Art in 2003. 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.
From 1999 to 2001, Lum wrote an online journal for LondonArt, which chronicled both his passion for and misgivings of art. He co-founded the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art in 2000, along with Zheng Shengtian, and edited it until 2004.
In 2005, Lum co-curated Shanghai Modern 1919-1945, 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 biennial in the Middle East.
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". [1]
Lum realized a second permanent public art commission outside St. Moritz, 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 December 1, 2006, the work is titled Pi and is situated over the course of a 130 meter long pedestrian passageway at Karlsplatz's West Passage.
[edit] References
- ^ O'Brian, Melanie. (2001). Ken Lum: Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White. [Brochure]. Vancouver, British Columbia: Vancouver Art Gallery.
