“I don’t like being a prisoner to the art market,” artist Ken Lum tells Observer. One of the most celebrated contemporary artists hailing from Canada, Lum has enjoyed a multifaceted career—he’s an artist who works in paint and sculpture, a writer, a curator, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founding editors of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His works, which have been exhibited around the world in museums and biennials, often critique the socio-political structures of class and racial identities in contemporary societies.
Lum takes a unique stance as a teacher and mentor for young artists. He sees teaching as an extension of his artistic practice, but he also simply enjoys being in the classroom because it allows him to reacquaint himself with the purpose of art, forcing him to reread and rethink things in an environment where the dialogue of art and culture can be fraught.
He has, he says, a longstanding skepticism about the art world. “I entered art thinking it was a much more lofty idealistic pursuit, but there are many aspects of the art world that I am not comfortable with. I don’t like being a prisoner of the art market. We always look at art as for the common good when the reality of the art world is in many ways parallel to many other worlds. It’s also a social field where you have to learn how you negotiate yourself.”
Lum’s writings, which cover a striking range of topics from Pazyryk carpet styles to Asian American histories, express deeper concerns. In Art and Ethnology: A Relationship in Ironies (2005), Lum wrote that the “game of art today is rather like the case of Don Quixote,” reflecting on the institutionalization of contemporary art and the museum as both cultural infrastructure and a social space. In the 1970s, when he started making art, the art world was opened up to different constituencies, such as conceptual art, that challenged the status quo of art and institutions. Among them, the most eminent criticism of art was in terms of the most prominent material form: paintings. In contrast, Lum notes a return of paintings in the art market: “Nowadays more than 90 percent of the contemporary artworks displayed in galleries are paintings,” he says, which shows a returning taste of painting among collectors that diverged from the turn to conceptualism in the ’70s.
The pursuit of art beyond the institutional framework is prominent in Lum’s works, both in galleries and in public. When asked about the key message he expresses to young artists who are navigating their careers in the institutional landscape, he says, “We all know that institutional frames define part of art. I try to transmit this self-awareness to my students for them to be fully cognizant of art and its relationship to politics, the socio-economic forces and cultural biases. There will be degrees of compromise in one’s ideals of art through negotiations, but one should be aware of one’s subject position to the world of a constellation of institutions surrounding you.”
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Lum believes a good artist needs to be proficient at negotiating with institutions, but at the same time, art should be a destabilizing force in many areas, including the institutional frame. According to German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “the acculturation problem,” the critique of institutions eventually becomes institutionalized. However, Lum believes that the avant-garde spirit of art cannot be totally defined by institutions. “The power of art to disrupt politics through its undefinable language is still present in international biennales, especially in the less developed parts of the world, where important questions like identities and immigration are still being discussed.”
Today, Lum teaches a course called The Chinese Body and Spatial Production in Chinatown. Over the past decades, multiple plans were proposed to turn Philadelphia’s Chinatown into a casino, a stadium and, most recently, a new arena for the Philadelphia 76ers. Though the plan was approved by votes in the Philadelphia City Council, the 76ers abandoned the plan after multiple protests by the coalition of Chinatown residents and beyond. Long before teaching this class and recent activism, Lum had written two screenplays about Chinese American history. Set in 1868, the first script involves a wagon train carrying two wagons of Chinese workers contracted to work in the Idaho gold fields during the gold rush. The second script is set in 1885, three years after the Chinese Exclusion Act at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment.
Lum’s interest in Chinatown ties into the fact that the history of Chinese immigration has been imagined and represented by the West in ambiguous or even fraudulent ways over time. Topics like contracted labor are hugely underrepresented at the theoretical, practical or even pedagogical levels. Lum gives countless examples of the forgotten history of Chinese immigrants: They were among the groups that were part of the indentured labor that built much of the infrastructure of the world in the 19th Century, known as ‘The Chinese experiment.’ Not only did many Chinese die, but there were also countless massacres, like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871. Lum’s other examples include the American clipper ship Waverly, on which in 1855, 300 Chinese workers being shipped to Lima, Peru, were locked in the hold for the whole trip, and all died of asphyxiation. “I always wondered why this is not talked about,” Lum says.
“On one hand, the Chinese are seen as hardworking, skilled, smart and highly educated workers. On the other hand, all those attributes are also seen as the wiliness of the enemy, as seen in depictions of Chinese fictitious figures, such as Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. These stereotypes of Chinese immigrants are still present today, as China becomes demonized again.” Lum’s interest in speaking for the Chinese communities sees him tracing the history of Chinatown in America. Late 19th-century Chinatown, in particular, was an intriguing place, for better or for worse, because it was a safe free space for immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and so forth, but it was also where ruthless pimps forced women as young as 12 into sex work. In contemporary America, Chinese people are still underrepresented, both politically and in arts and culture, Lum asserts. There is still the trope of effeminate Chinese masculinity, and Chinese political voices are generally very quiet. Misrepresentations continue to affect how people perceive the community—something Lum’s works (and his teachings) aim to counter.
That said, Lum’s works reach far beyond the conceptualization of art institutions and explorations of Asian identities. One of his most influential public art pieces is Melly Shum Hates Her Job (1989), exhibited on the side façade of the Witte de With Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, since 1990, when he held a solo exhibition for the commencement of the museum. In half of the billboard-style work, a friendly, smiling Asian woman sits at a desk in her office, while the large caption “Melly Shum hates her job” occupies the other half. It leaves an open-ended question of whether Melly Shum faces discrimination in the workplace due to her gender, race or some other unfortunate reason. The strong message received unprecedented attention and became such a cultural icon in Rotterdam that when the exhibition ended, the gallery directors received numerous letters and calls asking why the piece was gone. The piece was then reinstalled, and the center was renamed Kunstinstituut Melly.
Viewers’ experiences are always a crucial but somewhat unpredictable part of public art-making, and Lum mentions that he did not expect the Melly Shum poster to become so popular in the city and around the world. Still, as he works, Lum keeps viewer reception in mind. “I think every artist tries to have an ideal reception in mind, and I do, too,” and the ideal reception is based on a calculus built upon how his work has been received in the past and what he knows about his audience. “You don’t just say, ‘I hope the reception will be excellent’—it’s based on much research and thought you put into the work.” With Melly Shum Hates Her Job, he hoped people would like it, but its widespread popularity came as a surprise, “and it had nothing to do with me,” he said humbly. “Actually, I was lucky as a public artist. I was lucky that whatever confluences came into play at that moment in time. I was lucky that it resonated with people. It said something about the changing dynamics of people’s lack of freedom to explore who they are because they’re tied to their work. I was lucky I was able to tap into that.”
In Moveables (2023), a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA), Lum exhibited pieces from his furniture sculpture series, including The Curse is Come Upon Me. (2023). He has continued the series from 1978 to the present, exploring the potential of seemingly mundane industrially produced furniture. Why has this work held his attention for more than four decades? “The obvious answer would be that I continue to do it because I feel that I haven’t fully explored,” he says. “The language and concerns that are communicated by the work are still relevant.” On the one hand, “they look weird.” On the other, “they also are highly deflective in the sense that when people look at the furniture work, they are looking at a double image of other spaces in which the furniture could end up in or come from.” While one can appreciate the form, artistry and techniques of, say, a stainless steel sculpture, furniture evokes the invisible bodies using them in all spatial contexts.
Furniture, be it in a Fifth Avenue luxury apartment or Walmart, is characterized by economic class and different tastes that fluctuate with context. One might find a piece of Walmart furniture in a Fifth Avenue apartment if it is collected as a piece of art. “When something is displayed in a gallery, no one questions its status as art.” Lum pauses here to share an anecdote: in one of his talks in San Francisco, an audience member asked him why he picked a specific piece of striped furniture, which the questioner described as gaudy. Lum’s answer was that it was something his mother, who worked in a sweatshop as an immigrant in Canada, would have liked. Oddly, the audience was not convinced that it was a genuine answer.
Most recently, Lum has been working on a number of public art projects for his hometown in Vancouver, Canada. Previously, in Vancouver’s East 6th Avenue, Lum turned the East Van Cross—the symbol of the city’s traditionally less privileged and harder-edged half—into a 57-foot sculpture, Monument to East Vancouver (2010), that lights up after dark. One of the tropes of public art is to recall something of the past. However, when connecting sculptures to Vancouver’s history of former agrarian farmland, Lum’s project instead reinterprets public art rhetoric by creating a sculpture of an Asian picker holding a huge container of berries, which serves as an homage to the exploited labor of immigrants. Here, too, Lum shines a light on the history of immigration with artistic and social criticism shared in his thoughtful and innovative voice.
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