Image 1/1
Spadina 2007 — Giclée print on canvas. 137,5x152cm. Ed:3
Palace 2007 — Giclée print on canvas. 136x159cm. Ed:3
Grace Chung Financial 2001 — Plexiglas, powdercoated aluminum, enamel paint, glue, plastic letters. 198x198cm. Ed:2
Danny's Shoe Renu 2001 — Perspex, powder coated aluminium, enamel paint, glue and plastic letters. 198x162x5cm. Ed:2
Hanoi Travel 2000 — Plexiglas, powder-coated lacquered aluminium, enamel paint, glue and plastic letters. 183x183x5cm. Ed:2
Ken Lum was part of the group of artists from Vancouver that irrupted onto the contemporary art scene with an air of change throughout the eighties and that later became an artistic point of reference. His work combines photographic portraits with brief texts in a sort of large diptych that explores new readings based on traditional artistic and photographic languages. Born in 1956, Canadian of Chinese origin, Lum is an artist with considerable international presence at museums and art centres, biennial exhibitions (in Venice, Sao Paolo, Havana, Istanbul, etc.), documenta, etc. He has worked with photography, video, installation art and painting. He has also worked as a teacher and as a curator.
Language has had an evocative power in very diverse cultural traditions. Magic and religion have been used in rituals and in prayers. At the same time, the essential ability to interpret the world has been attributed to language. Thus, language gives form to human rationality. Ken Lum has clearly been aware of all of this when using language in his works of art. The perspective that he adopts is, in this respect, deconstructive, with the inclusion of references to comics and to the collage, the very evocative tendency used by the Avant-garde artists. This formal deconstruction is combined with conceptual deconstruction, which is expressed in the messages that apparently seem far from all transcendence but in reality are full of irony.
In the works of Ken Lum, language is treated as a formal structure that can be combined with photographic images, drawings, etc. Henceforth, this formalisation of the language implies the adoption of a certain aesthetic sense, an expression of beauty. This makes it possible to explain the presence of decorative elements, the order and the rhythm of the composition, the colours and the specular symmetry. This division in two of the image following the visual effect of the reflection brings us to the trail of the footprints of aesthetical reference points that dig their roots into the baroque: the fondness for decoration and the attraction by the effects of the mirrors. Let’s remember the artist that presented at documenta X1 (2002) a work of art that consisted of a maze made of mirrors, Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression.
The show put on by advertising often becomes the starting point of his works. Texts and images taken from a very specific landscape, the landscape of that iconography fed to us on a daily basis from the supermarket shelves, the ads in newspapers and magazines and hoardings. Signs, colours, letters and drawings make up icons that have broken into the imagery of the public space. The portraits show us people on the street, portraits that are between an instant photo and an accurate staging of the scene. Far beyond a literal reading, his images show us, more than posters or marketing labels, an entire human and urban landscape full of complexity. His works have become a point of reference for the changing identity of our societies, which are characterised by cultural diversity and by the melting pot. Conflict and contradiction emerge even under the appearance of balance and of a certain degree of harmony.
Because we do not need to fool ourselves. Far from the superficial banality of advertising and of ads in newspapers, under the day to day appearance, tragedy often emerges. Thus, we find sentences, just to give a few examples, such as “All power to the people”, “Please leave my family alone” and “Help free Leonard Pelltier” (the Indian activist who was found guilty in an irregular judicial process for the assassination of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian reserve). The six graphic works that close the exhibition reaffirm the direction of the Ken Lum’s artistic discourse, the relationship between people and their place and their surroundings, their origin, difference and, ultimately, the identity in their conflicts between the areas of that which is public and that which is private. Using popular ways by operating the mechanisms that awaken attraction, Ken Lum puts us in the face of enigmas that pierce the axes of our society.
Miquel Bardagil
»View biography of Ken Lum