Ken Lum
Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA is a Canadian and American artist, academic, and curator. Lum's artistic practice spans multiple media including painting, sculpture and photography. His playfully politically oriented works, which range from conceptual to representational, often explore themes of identity linked to language, portraiture, and spatial politics. Since 2012, Lum has taught as a Professor of Fine Art in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Early life
Lum was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1956 and grew up in Strathcona, Vancouver and Kensington-Cedar Cottage in East Vancouver. He attended Admiral Seymour Elementary, Lord Selkirk Elementary and Gladstone Secondary School.Career
Lum received an MFA from University of British Columbia in 1985. One of his earliest major projects was his Portrait-Logo series from the mid-1980s, in which he paired portraits with logos, names, or descriptive text. The works borrow from the aesthetics of family photography and advertising, sometimes also commenting on stereotypes of gender and ethnicity. By creating a tension between image and text, Lum destabilizes meaning and makes the viewer conscious of their role in constructing meaning.He is represented by the New York City gallery Magenta Plains, Galerie Nagel-Draxler, Royale Projects, and Misa Shin Gallery.
Teaching
From 2000 to 2006, Lum was Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art at the University of British Columbia, where he had taught since 1990, resigning in 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2005 and worked at Bard until 2007. He taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1995 to 1997 while taking leave from UBC.Lum guest taught a semester at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste or Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China, the l'Ecole d'Arts Plastique in Fort de France, Martinique. For several years, he served as an External Critic at De Ateliers and the Rijksakademie, both located in Amsterdam, as well as the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He led several so-named Master Classes at the Banff Centre. In 2012, Lum joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia. The following year, he was appointed a Fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. In 2019, he received the title of University of Pennsylvania Presidential Professor, specifically holding the endowed position of Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor of Fine Arts.
Awards
While at the University of British Columbia, he received the Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998 and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. In 2003, Lum was honored with the Distinguished University Professor Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative and Performing Arts. He was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007. In 2011, Lum received an ArtMoves Special Award from the City of Toruń, Poland. In 2013, he won a Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award in public art. In 2015, Lum was awarded an Honoris Causa Doctorate degree from Simon Fraser University, his undergraduate alma mater.In 2017, he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2018, Lum was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. In 2019, Lum was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Award and in 2020 a Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Lum won the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2023. Lum was awarded the Monument Lab Changemaker Award during a ceremony at the Independence Visitor Center in Philadelphia. In 2024, Lum was conferred a King Charles III Coronation Medal by David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, Canada.
Exhibitions
Lum participated in the Carnegie International 1991, Sydney Biennale in 1995, the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1997, and the Shanghai Biennale in 2000 where he also helped edit the exhibition catalog, and at Documenta XI in 2002. Other exhibitions include Johannesburg Biennale 1997, Liverpool Biennial 2006, Tang Contemporary Art, Istanbul Biennial 2007 and the 2008 Gwangju Biennale and Arrow Factory Beijing in 2010.A retrospective survey of Lum's work opened in February 2011 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lum participated and gave a presentation at the Moscow Biennale 2011. In 2014, he exhibited at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts. The Whitney Museum of American Art invited Lum to exhibit as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2018, he exhibited in a survey exhibition at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. In 2022, due to Lum's being a recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, the exhibition Ken Lum: Death and Furniture was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario curated by Xiaoyu Weng and co-organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Remai Modern. As the Scotiabank Photographer Award winner for 2023, Lum was conferred a solo exhibition at The Image Centre in Toronto in 2024, he was also subject of a published book distributed worldwide by Steidl.
Cultural service activities
Lum has participated in numerous public committees throughout his career. He served as the director of the then-non-funded Or Gallery from 1982 to 1984 and was a member of the City of Vancouver's Public Art Committee from 1994 to 1996. He sat on the board of directors for the Or Gallery from 1992 to 1994, and he was a board member with the Arts Initiative Tokyo in Japan from 2001 to 2008. He served on the board of the Annie Wong Art Foundation in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2002 and on Centre A: Center for Asian Art 2002 to 2007. From 2003 to 2004, Lum was a member of the Vancouver Art Gallery's Master Planning Committee. In 2010, he was a part of the advisory committee for the Canada Council dedicated to international engagement and acted as a juror for the City of Vancouver exhibitions assistance awards.From 2010 to 2012, he was a juror for the Mayor's Art Awards in. In 2010, he also presented at the inaugural Yishu Art Awards held in Xi'an, China. In 2011, he served as a juror for the Brink Award in focusing on emerging artists from. From 2011 to 2017, he was a board member of the Canada Post Stamp Advisory Committee in Ottawa, Ontario. He also served as a board member of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in from 2011 to 2012.
In 2003, Lum was a juror for the Prix de Rome prize in the Netherlands, specifically for the category of Art in Public Space at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, for which he wrote the accompanying essay for the publication on the prize. From 2007 - 2012, he was on the advisory board of Fillip, a critical art and cultural journal based in Vancouver. In 2008, Lum acted as a juror for the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in Beijing to which he also wrote an essay on the winning artist Liu Wei and juror for the New Contemporaries Exhibition in London, UK. Lum was a juror of the inaugural Lola Award for Contemporary Dance in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, Lum was a board member of CACHET, a three-year project of the University of Toronto's University College Canadian Studies program. In 2015, Lum was a juror for the Jerome Emerging Artists Fellowship in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2017, he was a juror of the AIMIA/AGO photography prize. In 2019, Lum participated as a juror for the 9.4 billion USD King Salman Park project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Lum was also a Toronto Biennial of Art board member from 2020 to 2023. Since 2022, he has been on the board of Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image in Philadelphia.
Keynote addresses
Lum has delivered several keynote addresses throughout his career. He was the keynote speaker at the 1997 Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference. In 2006, he served as the keynote speaker at the third and final symposium of the 15th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. In 2010, Lum was the keynote speaker at the annual CIMAM World Museums conference held at the Shanghai Art Museum in Shanghai, China.In early 2020, he gave the keynote address at the inauguration of the Kunstinstituut Melly multi-purpose venue in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Later that year, he delivered the keynote address for the "Becoming Public Art" conference in Markham, Ontario, conducted virtually due to the pandemic. In 2022, Lum was the keynote speaker at the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics conference hosted by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the keynote speaker at the 2023 Canadian Arts Conference at Koerner Hall, the University of Toronto. In 2024, Lum gave the keynote address for the Annual Karl Duldig Lecture on Sculpture in Melbourne, Australia. In 2025, Lum was keynote presenter at the BUMP Urban Art Festival in Calgary, Alberta.
Writings
From 1999 to 2001, Lum wrote an online journal for LondonArt, which chronicled both his passion for and concerns about art. In 2000, he co-founded the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art with Zheng Shengtian and served as Editor-in-Chief until 2004. Together, they organized the first large-scale international curators' tour of China in 2000, which included curators from notable institutions such as Documenta, Dia Art Foundation, Renaissance Society, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Gate Foundation and the Art Gallery of Ontario.Lum has authored many essays covering a range of topics on art and culture, including the relationship between art and ethnology for the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands, as well as the art of Chen Zhen for the Kunsthalle Wien. His other writings include a historical analysis of Canadian cultural policy and a paper presented to the Department of Caribbean Studies at Yale University, which explored multiple identities as depicted in Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. In 2008, Lum completed an art book project with French philosopher Hubert Damisch, titled Ultimo Bagaglio, published by Three Star Books in Paris. In 2009, Lum contributed an essay addressing the challenges facing art education today for Art School: published by MIT Press. In 2012, following his move to Philadelphia, he began writing a quarterly art column for "Canadian Art" magazine. In 2013, he presented a paper for publication on contemporary art versus visual culture for the M+ Museum of Visual Culture of the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong. He also presented a paper on the work of conceptual artist Ian Wilson at the Dia Art Foundation in New York.
In 2016, Lum contributed a catalog essay for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The book and catalog for the exhibition and project "Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia" was issued in the fall of 2019 by Temple University Press. A book of writings titled "Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991 - 2018" was released by Concordia University Press in early 2020. He contributed an essay for the book "Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts" in 2020. In 2023, he wrote an essay for the catalog for Brenda Draney's exhibition at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.