| Biography: | Ken Lum was born in 1956 and is a
Canadian artist of Chinese heritage who
lives and works in Vancouver, British
Columbia. 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.
He was Head of the Graduate Programme 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. For two
years he was 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 received the Distinguished
University Professor Award and the
Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding
Achievement in Creative and Performing
Art. 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 in South Korea.
From 1999 to 2001, Lum wrote an online
journal for London Art, 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 2006, Lum
was keynote speaker opening the 3rd and
final symposium of the 15th Biennale of
Sydney. He has written several catalogue
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 North West Annual for the Center of
Contemporary Art in Seattle. 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. 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. In 2008, Lum
was a juror for the Chinese Contemporary
Art Awards conducted in Beijing.
Lum has worked on several public art
projects. In Vienna in 2000, Lum
realised 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 Nation longboat, a cargo
ship, the steam liner Komagata Maru, and
George Vancouver's ship HMS Discovery.
Each vessel has been placed at each 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.
Lum realised a second permanent public
art commission outside St Moritz,
Switzerland in 2004. Another major
public art commission opened in downtown
Vienna in January 2007, the work is
entitled Pi and is situated over the
course of a 130 metre long pedestrian
passageway at Karlsplatz's West Passage.
Lum is presently working on a fourth
permanent public art commission due to
open in 2010 in the city of Utrecht, The
Netherlands for the Nieuw Welgelegen
district, a troubled but dynamic
multi-ethnic area that is undergoing
redevelopment. | | | Source: | New Contemporaries website | | | Date of source: | accessed 2009 |
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| | Gender: | male | | Type: | person |
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