I wait until the end of my interview with Ken Lum to ask about a comparison he had made over a decade ago. In a 2011 interview, the eminent photographer had said, regarding the early days of his artistic practice: “To me, at the time, conceptual art was sort of like punk music. Anyone could become a punk musician. Conceptual art is open to any interested participant.” The analogy surprises me—conceptual art is often perceived as abstruse and elitist, in seeming contradiction to the punk ethos. Lum pauses for a second, looking a bit surprised by my quotation. He is as prolific a writer as he is an artist. Almost three decades of his personal and critical essays have been gathered together into a nearly 300-page collection entitled Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018. Lum casually mentions having enough material for another.
“This is a tricky question,” he begins answering. “I was a fauna and flora illustrator, drawing plants and animals such as the yellow cedar or the black bear published in British Columbia government tourism brochures. I was also a sign painter’s assistant. For instance, I would paint a ten-foot plate of Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and peas and the words ‘TODAY’S SPECIAL.’ It wasn’t art, but it was a substitute for it. I was skeptical about contemporary art when I first entered into it in the late 1970s, which was at the tail end of conceptualism. In my first art class, I wondered, ‘How can people aspire to be artists if they can’t even draw a horse?’ I remember being even a little bit angry at my art-class peers. I thought they were charlatans. But then I realized that there was a logic to art. It wasn’t just random, or a game, or purely esoteric for its own sake; it had a philosophical quest to dissect and explicate meaning in a complex world. It wasn’t reliant on the tainted, patriarchal Beaux-Arts system.”
Lum, who is of Chinese descent, was born in Vancouver in 1956. His upbringing was marked by economic and social precarity, an experience that profoundly marks his worldview, but which he tries not to romanticize. He continues, “Art embraced multiple voices by welcoming diverse people, technologies, and mediums. It celebrated the amateur or the non-specialist and even celebrated unspecialized photography. You didn’t have to be Ansel Adams. You just needed a small camera to take a picture. I felt lucky to enter into art then. Conceptual art allowed me to express all kinds of things. The public’s lack of interest in conceptual art was mainly due to their preconceived notion that art should be highly representational, display technical skill, and be aesthetically pleasing without being intellectually challenging or tested.”
“Art embraced multiple voices by welcoming diverse people, technologies, and mediums. It celebrated the amateur or the non-specialist and even celebrated unspecialized photography. You didn’t have to be Ansel Adams. You just needed a small camera to take a picture.” – Ken Lum
So much about Lum’s creative life can be gleaned from this answer, especially when considered alongside his 2024 solo exhibition at Toronto’s Image Centre. The exhibition opened on May 3rd as part of the 2024 CONTACT Photography Festival and is part of Lum’s prize as the recipient of the 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award. It’s not a retrospective per se; though the pieces on display span his career, significant aspects of his multidisciplinary practice—which includes public art installations, sculptures, screenplays, and essays, as well as curatorial and architectural projects—are beyond the scope of the show. The show presents four series as exemplary of the artist’s process and thinking and invites the viewer into Lum’s creative world—one that is vivid, bold, satiric, and informed as much by his time in commercial design as by his extensive reading of philosophy.
The front room is dedicated to two recent bodies of work that take a jab at contemporary capitalist culture. From the first is a colourful pie chart entitled Pie Chart 1: Social Media and Income (2012), which evokes the ubiquitous use of infographics to distill data into a digestible form. The diagram, however, is completely abstract; it contains no text. The reference image for the work is a pie chart intended to convey the hypothetical fortune to be made through social media marketing. “Although this type of mapping provides much information, it still overlooks subjectivity,” Lum observes. The only context given for the image is its title, thus drawing the viewer’s attention to what is conveyed by its form—a perfect circle that encompasses all possibilities—thus leaving room to imagine the many mechanism through which money is accrued online.
Next to this is a set of 12 diptychs presenting the “employees of the month” of a fictitious German company. Here, the Salisbury steak from Lum’s sign-painting days is replaced by the schnitzel. The hired hands are demographically diverse, but their uniform dress, comprised of a yellow polo shirt and a red baseball hat emblazoned with the name of the business, gives the impression of a homogenous workforce. “I’m interested in subjugated individuals and identity markers like race, gender, age, and sexuality,” says Lum. “I also seek to understand how we are all connected.”
A similar impetus drives an earlier series, World Portrait, which the artist produced in 1991. For this series, Lum organized snapshots, taken while wandering the streets, according to types such as “Skateboarder,” “Dog,” “Woman with Bag,” or “Adult and Child.” Inspired by the writings of Hegel and Agamben, Lum probes the concept of identity, along with its opposite. He explains: “Your identity is not only defined by who you are but also by who you believe you are not.” The different figures are arranged on large white canvases whose negative space both unites and separates them. The result is unsettling. From afar, the work is pleasing in its abstraction. Up close, the cropped black-and-white screen prints arranged on the canvas recall surveillance images and intimate that someone or something else is determining where the figures fit. The categories call to mind how contemporary AI algorithms sort photographs, raising questions about who determines identity and what codes they use to do so.
Lum believes that artists become artists “because they cannot fully identify with the world as it is.” The personal essay that prefaces Everything Is Relevant is filled with anecdotes that hover at the threshold of different spaces, like giving up high-school art class because of artistic disagreements with his teacher or oscillating between science and art while at university. Even today, he can’t fully identify with the art world: “I became an artist to break free from societal expectations, but the art world as it is structured doesn’t align with my values. This is what identity/non-identity means to me,” he recounts.
The last part of the exhibition features recent additions to the well-known series Portrait-Repeated Text (1993–). Not too long ago, rummaging through his archives, the artist’s wife unearthed large-format negatives Lum had taken when he began the series, but had yet to make into finished works, “probably because I couldn’t afford to make them, since they were expensive,” he muses. Some 30 years later, these images of working-class people are as relevant as ever. Similarly, the formal juxtaposition of text and image still feels contemporary today. In the preface to Everything Is Relevant, Lum writes that he is “interested in the pictorial qualities of text as much as I am in the textuality of pictures.” Such a preoccupation originates in both his early work as a commercial designer, combining illustrations with slogans, as well as in his experience of the role language plays in opening and enclosing spaces.
In a biographical essay, Lum recounts what it was like growing up in a non-English speaking family, having to translate packaging while learning to read and “learning the ropes of the dominant world” thanks to a neighbour with ties to Canadian musician Glenn Gould. “Language shapes our identity even before we are born,” he remarks. “However, language can also be limiting, as we are always more complex than what words can convey. The individuals in the Portrait-Repeated Text works are portrayed at the extremes of emotion—whether immense joy or deep sadness—which cannot be fully expressed through language.”
Still, following Lum’s thinking, we should be wary of relying too much on photography.
In his essay “From Analog to Digital,” he argues that “photography is contingent, a condition of all socially developed practices. Even vision itself is assumed to be ‘natural’ when it is anything but. We learn to ‘see’ in particular ways that are dependent upon our place and time in the world. An example of this is what we see as qualifying as ‘beautiful’ or ‘horrific.’” In the Portrait-Repeated Text diptychs, the words on the right panel, written in such a way that they become mantras, orient the reading of the photographs, teaching us how to look at them. A photograph of a man sitting on the ground, alone, with his mouth open as if speaking to himself, is paired with text that begins, “I’m not stupid. I’m not fucking stupid. You’re stupid…” continuing in variations on the same statements.
The text reads as the potential monologue of the person pictured. We are told to not look at the man as “stupid.” But the script also tells us about how we already see. If we hadn’t been told that this man isn’t stupid, something in how he looks might have made us categorize him as such. For Lum, it is through this process of see-sawing between words and images, between different forms of languages and between different aesthetic codes, that we can better understand how meaning is made.
