Ken Lum

The East Van cross is, in its own right, older than Lum's sculpture. The symbol, a Latin cross formed from the shared letter A in the words EAST and VAN, has circulated for decades on sidewalks, jackets and tattoos across Vancouver's Eastside; the City of Vancouver's own public art program describes its origins as obscure and possibly linked to the neighbourhood's once-large Roman Catholic population, appropriated over the years by schoolchildren, graffiti writers and gang members, sometimes extended to read East Van Rules. In 2009 the City of Vancouver commissioned Lum, through the Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program's Mapping and Marking initiative, to render the sign as a permanent public artwork; Monument for East Vancouver was installed in 2010 above a fenced, demolished lot at Clark Drive and East 6th Avenue, a steel and aluminum sign roughly seventeen and a half metres high, lit by LEDs that switch on at dusk and off at dawn, facing west toward the city's downtown core.

The critical reception was immediate. Writing in Esse, the critic Kathleen Ritter called the work 'immediately iconic' within months of its unveiling and read it as an ironic, multivalent gesture rather than a simple assertion of Eastside pride, placing it in a lineage of Vancouver's text-based public art alongside Lawrence Weiner, Ron Terada and Liam Gillick. But Lum has been explicit, in a 2023 interview for Border Crossings, that the popular framing of the piece as an expression of pride in where he grew up is a misreading he keeps having to correct on the record. Asked by media, in his own account, whether the monument celebrates his pride in the East Side, Lum said he answers no: 'If I'd had my druthers as a child, and could choose where I would have preferred to grow up, the West Side or the East Side, I'd pick the West Side... Why would I be proud of growing up poor in East Vancouver? Why would I be proud of growing up the son of a sweatshop worker who died early because of the sweatshop?' He has said the work is 'about all the trauma of the East Side,' and that he is proud of his mother, not of the background he grew up in. He has also addressed, in the same interview, the recurring public argument over whether the cross reads as Christian: Lum has said on the record that it is a Christian cross, a fact, in his account, about the ethos of the society the sign speaks from.

Lum's own account of his early life, given in the Border Crossings interview, is specific and consistent with the Canadian Encyclopedia's summary: born in Vancouver in 1956 to a family descended from a grandfather who came to Canada in 1908 to labour for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he grew up in a household heated by a wood-burning stove, attended Admiral Seymour Elementary, the poorest and highest-turnover school in the Lower East Side, and did not speak English until he was six. He worked as a flora-and-fauna illustrator for the British Columbia government and, later, as a sign painter's assistant, lettering banners by hand; he has said the trade taught him to see the hand of the artist behind a sign, a perception that stayed with him once computers took over the trade. He took a Bachelor of Science in biological sciences at Simon Fraser University, completed in 1980, before discovering conceptual art and going on to a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 1985. His curriculum vitae lists his first solo exhibitions from 1978: Sculpture for Livingroom/Public Lounge and Walk Piece in Vancouver, alongside two outdoor performance pieces, Entertainment for Surrey, B.C. and Anonymous. He curated and directed the artist-run OR Gallery in Vancouver from 1983 to 1984, and by 1990 had joined the faculty of UBC's Department of Fine Arts, rising from assistant to associate to full professor and heading its Graduate Program in Studio Art from 2000 to 2006.

Lum's signature medium since the mid-1980s pairs a photograph with text in a single flat panel, most often a chromogenic print combined with enamel or vinyl lettering on aluminum or Plexiglas. The Portrait-Logo series, begun 1984 to 1986, staked out the method: a studio-style portrait paired with an invented corporate logo or descriptive text, drawing on the conventions of family photography and advertising to interrogate how identity is assigned rather than chosen. The Portrait-Repeated Text works, begun in 1993 and continuing to the present, pair an image with a short line of vernacular speech repeated several times with small variations, such as You Don't Love Me (1994) or I lost my job (2021); Lum has said the repetition is deliberate, designed to let the eye move quickly between image and text rather than forcing a slow, sequential reading, likening the effect to the small illuminated windows Anne Hollander described in Dutch painting. The Shopkeeper series takes the same photo-text form to small retail signage, cataloguing invented immigrant-owned businesses undone by larger economic forces, such as the Maple Leaf All Canadian Products shopkeeper whose parting sign reads Drop Dead Canada. The Necrology series, begun around 2017, scales the method up into large printed broadsides that give invented, densely detailed obituary-style biographies to fictional but sociologically plausible people, a form the critic Robert Enright has likened to frontispieces, runaway-slave notices and theatre bills; he has said each text took ten to twelve weeks to write. Running alongside all of this since 1978 is the Furniture Sculptures series, cheap rented or found domestic furniture arranged into closed, inaccessible tableaux that speak to consumer culture, minimalism and class exclusion at once; Lum has said he chose deliberately unfashionable furniture because he thought it was what his own mother would have found desirable, a choice one curator, at a dinner after a San Francisco talk, refused to believe was sincere.

Since the mid-1990s Lum's public art has been made through engineering and fabrication teams rather than a single studio, and his own biography names the collaborators rather than treating the commissions as solo objects. He has worked with Dialog Design of Edmonton on the replacement design for the Walterdale Bridge across the North Saskatchewan River; with the Planning Partnership of Toronto on Huron Square in Toronto's Chinatown; and with Miller Hull Architects of Seattle and Space2Place Landscape Architecture of Vancouver on a master plan for the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment plant in North Vancouver. Monument for East Vancouver itself is built of concrete and steel with an aluminum and impact-modified acrylic housing and LED illumination, according to the materials line Border Crossings published in 2023; it stands 17.4 metres high by that account and seventeen and a half by the City of Vancouver's, automated to switch on at dusk and off at dawn. His memorial Peace Through Valour (Battle of Ortona), sited in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square, depicts the ruined town of Ortona with four Canadian soldiers standing sentinel at its corners; it was commissioned in 2013 and completed in 2016. The two bronze figures of The Buffalo and the Buffalo Fur Trader for Edmonton, discussed below, were commissioned more than a decade before 2022 and completed in 2016, according to the Art Newspaper; Global News describes them as thirteen feet tall. No certificate, inventory-number or authentication procedure for Lum's editioned photo-text works is described in any source consulted for this page; that gap is recorded in the open questions below rather than filled by inference.

Lum's curriculum vitae lists more than a hundred public, corporate and private collections holding his work, among the museums the National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, M+ in Hong Kong, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, the Hammer Museum, the RISD Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, alongside the civic collections of Vancouver, Toronto, Burnaby and Surrey. His biennale record, as his own curriculum vitae lists it, runs from the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1991) and the Sydney Biennale (1992-93) through the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the twenty-fourth Sao Paulo Bienal (1998), Shanghai Biennale 2000, the 49th Venice Biennale's Arsenale exhibition Plateau of Humankind (2001, having also shown in an unofficial collateral event at the 1995 Biennale), Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), the tenth Istanbul Biennial (2007), the seventh Gwangju Biennale (2008), the fourth Moscow Biennale (2011) and the Whitney Biennial (2014). He was a co-curator, not an exhibiting artist, at the seventh Sharjah Biennial, Belonging, in 2005, where he contributed an essay on identity formation without foundations. The Vancouver Art Gallery gave him a full retrospective, curated by Grant Arnold, from 12 February to 25 September 2011, described in the gallery's own words as 'the most extensive survey of Ken Lum's work to date' and, per the gallery's own account, the first North American showing for several of the works included, accompanied by a 144-page catalogue from Douglas and McIntyre. The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco gave him a solo survey in 2018, and in 2024 the Image Centre in Toronto mounted Scotiabank Photography Award: Ken Lum, a career survey tied to his 2023 prize. His teaching career runs from sessional posts at the University of Ottawa and Simon Fraser University in the late 1980s, through UBC (1990-2006, professor and head of the graduate program from 2000), visiting professorships at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1994-95 and 1996-97) and the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich, a graduate professorship at Bard College's Milton Avery School (2005-07), to the University of Pennsylvania, where he has chaired fine arts at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design since 2016 and holds the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professorship since 2019.

Since the mid-1990s Lum has held permanent public commissions in Vienna, the Engadine region of Switzerland, Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver, and temporary ones in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun and Innsbruck. Pi, a permanent media installation of illuminated factoids set into the Opernpassage underpass at Karlsplatz, Vienna, opened 1 December 2006 after winning a City of Vienna public art competition. There Is No Place Like Home, a 540-square-metre installation on the facade of the Kunsthalle Wien completed around 2000, was widely discussed at the time as a response to the growth of the far right in Austrian politics. One commission was never installed where it was planned. The City of Edmonton commissioned two bronze sculptures from Lum, The Buffalo and the Buffalo Fur Trader, based on an 1878 photograph of a trader beside a pile of buffalo hides and meant to bookend the rebuilt Walterdale Bridge; the Art Newspaper reported in September 2022 that the commission was won in a competition in which consultation with local First Nations groups was mandatory, and Lum told the paper that city officials expressed 'delight' with the bronzes when he completed them in 2016. In August 2022 the city announced that it would not install them, a step the Art Newspaper described as deaccessioning the work. The city's statement, as the Art Newspaper quotes it, said: 'While some audiences may find the artwork thought-provoking, for others it may cause harm and induce painful memories. For this reason, it is not considered inclusive to all Edmontonians.' Global News reported that the city also noted the Rossdale area north of the bridge is an important location for Indigenous peoples, protected by law as a historic cemetery and burial ground. APTN News reported on 25 August 2022 that the Cree Metis artist Dawn Marie Marchand had been part of the Wicihitowin art circle that originally opposed the artwork to the Edmonton Arts Council; Marchand told APTN that the figure seated on the hides 'seemed like a triumph of colonization' and that she was 'thrilled' by the decision. In the same report the city's Director of Indigenous Relations, Jaiymi Miller, said in an emailed statement that her office 'agrees that the original artwork, intended to be installed at the Walterdale Bridge, is not appropriate and should not be installed,' and that the city's decision 'rests on the potential for the artwork to be misinterpreted as a celebration of colonization.' Lum told APTN that the city had called him to apologize for years of not communicating before telling him the work would be decommissioned, that he was seeking other institutions to take it, and that he regretted losing the chance to discuss it with Edmonton's Indigenous community. To the Art Newspaper he said the decision was 'authoritarian' ('The closure of it in advance of someone who may object to it is authoritarian'), and that he is interested in the fact that 'colonialism didn't end with decolonisation' and 'there's an aftermath that's alive and well.' According to a City of Edmonton news release reported by Global News, on Friday 24 February 2023 the city apologized for inferring that Lum meant to celebrate colonialism, said it had not intended to harm his 'stellar' reputation, described him as 'a highly respected and eminent Canadian-born artist, writer and academic...', and said it had worked with him to transfer the two bronzes into the municipal public art collection, to be installed in a location of his choosing.

Lum's galleries, Magenta Plains in New York, Royale Projects in Los Angeles and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Cologne and Munich, do not publish price lists, and none is inferred here. The secondary market, so far as the auction houses' own results pages show, is modest and weighted toward Canadian sales. Heffel, Canada's leading fine art auction house, has sold four Lum lots on record: Untitled (Ed) for CAD 6,250 including premium against an estimate of CAD 6,000 to 8,000 (Summer Select, 29 July 2021); Pamela Gloggins is Candi Sweet for CAD 1,404 including premium against CAD 2,000 to 3,000 (24 September 2009); I can't believe I'm in Paris for CAD 750 including premium against CAD 800 to 1,200 (Contemporary Canadian: Property from an Important Vancouver Collector, 25 March 2021); and I Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry for CAD 625 including premium against CAD 1,000 to 1,500 (Prints and Multiples, 27 September 2018); Heffel's results page does not itemize hammer separately from premium for these lots. At Phillips, the photo-text work Miss Vancouver, a chromogenic print, enamel, Plexiglas and aluminum panel 39 7/8 by 89 7/8 inches, sold for USD 13,750 including premium against an estimate of USD 2,000 to 3,000 in the Under the Influence day sale in New York (sale code NY010114; the exact sale date is not shown on the results page consulted). Phillips' results page also lists Shirley's Bakery at USD 10,965 including premium against USD 6,000 to 8,000, and Mirror-Diptychon at GBP 6,450 including premium against GBP 5,000 to 7,000, and three lots offered in London against estimates of GBP 1,000 to 2,000 each: Jim and Susan's Motel at GBP 6,250 including premium and There is no place like home at GBP 2,750, both without reserve, and Round Table Pizza at GBP 1,125; none of these carries a sale date on the page consulted. No hammer price is separately published for any of these lots by either house. There is no evidence in the sources consulted of a Lum lot at a major evening sale at Christie's or Sotheby's; his secondary market, unlike his museum and public-commission record, sits in the lower and middle tiers of the day-sale and regional-house market.

Lum's writing and curatorial work run alongside the studio practice rather than beneath it. He co-founded and edited Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2001 to 2005, remaining on its advisory board to 2018, and co-curated Shanghai Modern: 1919-1945 at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, in 2004-05, contributing an essay on aesthetic-education policy in China's first modern art school. In 2012 he co-founded Monument Lab in Philadelphia with the urban geographer Paul Farber, beginning, in his own account, as a series of classroom conversations; the organization describes itself as 'a nonprofit public art and history studio based in Philadelphia' that 'works with artists, students, educators, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory,' wording the interviewer Robert Enright singled out in Border Crossings for its 'simple sincerity.' Monument Lab's city-wide 2017 Philadelphia exhibition, which Lum co-curated, examined how public space encodes a city's monumental landscape and was widely reviewed as a reference point for other cities confronting contested monuments. In 2020 the organization received a USD 4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Lum's own book of essays, Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018, was published by Concordia University Press in 2020 and drew endorsements from, among others, the artist Hans Haacke. He has also written two feature-length screenplays, The Cook and The Expulsion (2020, 2022), exploring the history of Chinese contract labour in North America, material he also teaches at Penn.

Lum's honours track two separate careers, the artist's and the public intellectual's. He held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1999 and the University of British Columbia's Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998, and received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada on 1 December 2017, invested on 20 November 2018; the citation, in the Governor General's own words, calls him 'an influential figure on the contemporary art scene' whose 'photography and installations have been exhibited in Canada and abroad' and whose 'public art has garnered international praise,' naming his curatorial work on Shanghai Modern and Monument Lab specifically. The Art Gallery of Ontario awarded him the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, CAD 50,000 with a solo exhibition to follow, in 2019. In February 2020 he won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada's Lifetime Artistic Achievement award in the visual arts, worth CAD 25,000 with a medallion, presented that July in Edmonton; his nominator, Brian McBay, called him 'a living national treasure...' whose work 'continues to truly reshape the imagination of people in Canada as an uncomfortable nation...' On 4 May 2023 he won the thirteenth annual Scotiabank Photography Award, CAD 50,000 with a worldwide-distributed Steidl monograph and a solo exhibition during the CONTACT Photography Festival; the jury, chaired by the photographer Edward Burtynsky, called his 'vast range of work... an important contribution to Canadian art.' Simon Fraser University, his undergraduate alma mater, awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2015.

Several questions a careful reader would expect answered are not settled in the sources consulted for this page. No source describes a certificate, inventory-number or authentication practice for Lum's editioned photo-text works, in contrast to the incised inscriptions and underside edition numbers documented for some other living sculptors; whether the studio maintains such a system, and who confirms a Lum work today outside the three representing galleries, is not stated anywhere found. No catalogue raisonne has been published or announced. The exact edition sizes of the Portrait-Repeated Text and Necrology series are not given in any source consulted. Sale dates for several Phillips day-sale results (Shirley's Bakery, Mirror-Diptychon, Round Table Pizza, Jim and Susan's Motel, There is No Place Like Home) are not shown on the results page consulted, and neither Phillips nor Heffel separates hammer price from buyer's premium on any Lum lot found. No source consulted reports where The Buffalo and the Buffalo Fur Trader has been installed since the City of Edmonton said, in February 2023, that it would go to a location of Lum's choosing.