Visiting Artist's Talk — Ken Lum

For this week's Visiting Artist's Talk (VAT), we welcome artist, teacher and curator, Ken Lum.

Ken Lum is an artist best known for conceptual and representational work in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. His art often deals with how meanings are assigned to images, texts, and objects based on cultural, racial and social codes. A long-time professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia.  
 
He has published extensively, including a book of his collected writings issued by Concordia University Press in 2020. His exhibitions include Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale and Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), Kunstmuseum Luzern (Lucerne), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) and the 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, Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He is co-founder and Senior Curatorial Advisor for the Monument Lab, which was recently awarded $4m grant from the Mellon Foundation for its work on public monuments, and has served as curator for several large-scale exhibitions, including ‘Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945’ (various venues, 2004–) and ‘The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa: 1945 to 1994’ at MoMA (New York, 2002).    

The Visiting Artists' Talks (VAT) series for 2020/21 welcomes guests across two semesters to join us live via Teams every Monday afternoon during teaching weeks.

Each session brings an arts professional to talk with us (as a community) about what they do and why, and to chat with the student body honestly about their career journey and interests.

All of our talks are compulsory for our Fine Art students but open to anyone else who would like to join us.

Event link

The event will be hosted on Microsoft Teams via the link below. 

Link to Ken Lum’s talk.

For further information about the VAT series, please email Nick Thurston.

Image

Portrait of Ken Lum