Professor, Chair of Fine Arts Department, University of Pennsylvania., USA
Vancouver-born artist Ken Lum, is known worldwide for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He has also taught at UBC in Vancouver where was Head of Graduate Studio Fine Arts.
A founding editor of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, he has published extensively, including an artist’s book project he co-conceived with philosopher Hubert Damisch. He has an active and long art exhibition record including Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale among others. He has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, National Gallery of Canada and Vancouver Art Gallery.
Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous major permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City. He is currently working on several public art projects including for Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto and Yaounde (Cameroon).
Lum’s public art often deal with individual and social identity formation in the context of historical trauma and the complications of official and non-official memory. In 2016, he completed a memorial to the Canadian war effort in Italy during World War 2. The work is sited in Nathan Phillips Square of Toronto City Hall and depicts the town of Ortona, Italy, in the aftermath of war while four soldiers stand sentinel at each corner of the low-perspective work. The budgets Lum has worked with generally fall in the range of 1.2 million to 400,000 Canadian dollars.
Lum has also worked as part of architectural/engineering teams. He was on a team with Dialog in designing a replacement bridge for the Walterdale Bridge across the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton. The team budget was over $500,000,000.00 CAD. He was also on a team with The Planning Partnership of Toronto in designing a public space called Huron Square for Toronto Chinatown. Lastly, he was on a team with Miller Hull Architects of Seattle to come up with a Master Plan for the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment plant for North Vancouver, BC.
He is a prolific writer having written numerous major catalogue essays and juried papers. He was keynote speaker at the 2010 World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai. He was also keynote speaker for the 15th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia.
Lum has also been involved in co-conceiving and co-curating several large scale exhibitions including Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1949, Sharjah Biennial 2007, in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and the NorthWest Annual in Seattle. He is currently working on a major city-wide public art and architecture exhibition titled Monument Lab for the city of Philadelphia.