Ken Lum's interest in relationship between art and the world behind new book
Credit to Author: Dana Gee| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 19:00:14 +0000
When: Feb. 28, 7 p.m.
Where: Vancouver Biennale Centre
Free: Register at eventbrite.com
Artist Ken Lum said revisiting the writings in his new book Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991-2018 gave him a kind Scrooge complex as he was reminded of life lived.
“There were certain texts there I had completely forgotten I had written,” said the Vancouver native over the phone recently from Philadelphia, where he is the chair of the department of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
“A lot of the text I haven’t read since writing it.
“I don’t try to fetishize what I write. I don’t go back to it. It has actually been quite useful. This is going to sound terribly immodest but there was a moment when I read a text I had wrote I don’t know how many decades ago and I said to my wife ‘wow that was a good text’ … so I became a little pleased with myself,” added Lum.
When pressed for a piece that pleased him upon rereading, Lum pointed to On Board The Raft of the Medusa, a 1999 piece published in the NKA Journal of African Art about Théodore Géricault’s early 19th century painting.
Lum returns to his roots in Vancouver on Feb. 28 for the official launch of Everything is Relevant at the Vancouver Biennale Centre. The ticketed event will include a reading by Lum, a Q&A and book signing.
Lum is an internationally celebrated and award-winning visual artist whose work has been shown around the world. People around here will know him for the East Van cross (Monument for East Vancouver), and the boats on top of the Vancouver Art Gallery called Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White.
Monument to East Vancouver at the corner of Great Northern Way and Clark Dr.
Along with creating art all these years, Lum has been writing about it and been published in a wide range of international publications and journals.
“I was interested in art’s relationship to the world,” said Lum, 63, about his early years and writing.
“When you are interested in art’s relationship to the world it behooves you to initiate a lot of projects around the world, a lot of travel. You get some idea of that from the book.”
Lum said he looked to writing about art as a way to make him more fluent in the field he loved and worked in.
“For me writing reviews originally was a way for me to more quickly master art language and so on. Even dance language at that time. That was my only goal,” said Lum, who also wrote dance reviews in his early years.
As he progressed with his own work and became better known and sought after, Lum — a graduate of the University of B.C. masters of fine art program as well as the head of UBC’s graduate program in studio art from 2000-2006 — found writing offered him perspective on his relationship to the world of art.
“It was a kind of supplement, if you may, during periods where I had profound doubts about art, and that’s why I branched out into curatorial,” said Lum, who has overseen some large budget shows in Seattle, Shanghai, United Arab Emirates and Philadelphia.
While Lum is in Vancouver he will also be overseeing the installation and unveiling of his latest piece of art.
Called The Retired Draft horse and the Last Pulled Log, the nearly three-metre high and long bronze statue of a Percheron workhorse will be unveiled on March 2 at the Kings Crossing condo development at 7388 Kingsway in Burnaby.
Lum says the triangular lot makes for a perfect natural plaza for his latest work, commissioned by Cressey Development Group.
Ken Lum’s new piece, The Retired Drafthorse and the Last Pulled Log, will be installed on a private lot at the corner of Kingsway and Edmonds in Burnaby.
“I do very few public art (installations) on private developments. It is not for ideological reasons; I just don’t find the spaces all that interesting,” said Lum.
“But in this case I thought about it, and I thought that is actually quite a sizable space and moreover it is extremely visual and present, especially the drive along the very busy street of Kingsway. You are coming up this incline and there’s this space you can’t help but notice.”
The draft horse for Lum is a connection to the past.
“I’m interested in calling up the past, I guess, but not to romanticize the past but just to call it up as a kind of device to make people think about contemporaneity that’s been wrought,” said Lum, adding the horse is also nod to the area’s agrarian history, and how the Kingsway corridor was an important route into the downtown.
Lum has another potential creative win in the wings — he has written his first screenplay, and is in talks with filmmakers.
“Several major producers are very interested in it,” said Lum.
The tale he has penned is set in 1868 in Oregon. It is about a young Chinese cook working for a hauling company that is so good at his job that he gets kidnapped by a rival company.
Lum said he was inspired by a B.C. story.
“That story came out of an experience I had up at Hell’s Gate in B.C., and there’s a big sign there that says Johnny’s Oven and how he went missing. It was even speculated that he was kidnapped by a rival mining camp,” said Lum, about what is known as Johnnie’s Stove. The story is about a cook, the building of a railway, and an old stove that is said to come to life annually.
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