Ken Lum
Nationality: Canadian
Born: 1956, Vancouver

Ken Lum received an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University in 1980. During his time at SFU, he took an art history course with Jeff Wall and decided to change careers. After doing research towards a Master of Arts degree at the Department of Fine Arts, Education, New York University, in the early 1980s Lum returned to Canada and was director of the OR Gallery in Vancouver from 1983 to 1984. He received an M.F.A. in 1985 from UBC and has taught in the Department of Fine Arts at UBC since 1989. He has twice been a visiting professor at L'École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Over the past fifteen years Lum has exhibited his work throughout Canada, the US and Europe. A major solo exhibition of Lum's work, which was hosted by the VAG, was organized by the Witte de With, Rotterdam, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1990. Recently his work has been included in exhibitions at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff; Art Institute of Chicago; Aix-en-Provence, France; and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, New York. Ken Lum is represented by the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

While Lum has employed sculpture and painting in his practice it is his photo-text works that have gained the artist international attention in recent years. Using the portrait as his working model, Lum comments on various elements of contemporary life and art by juxtaposing text, whether it be a person's name or a fragment of a thought or dialogue, with photographs of stereotypes of people in ordinary (but staged) situations and environments. The friction that is created between the text and the image, while usually ironic, is more often unsettling and always ambiguous. In works that deal with issues such as race and class in a multicultural society and the influence of corporate power and mass media there is a critical edge that in some ways appears to make an intimate crisis or situation very exposed but this critique is less about the social type portrayed by Lum then about the inadequate social landscape that engenders such disfunction. In the end the viewer often feels some kind of kinship and sympathy for the characters in Lum's dramas.

Source: Acquisitions Justification