KEN LUM

“Cheung’s Food Market and Fruit Stand is a two-part work that addresses the agrarian past of Surrey, B.C. There are still animal and produce farms in Surrey, however diminished in number. The city is sited with numerous markers of its agricultural history. I am very interested in the binaries between urban and rural, present and past, and city life and country life that delineate the imagining of Surrey.

Fronting King George Boulevard is a reduced scale replica of Cheung’s Food Market that was located at 6009 168th Street in Surrey, and since redeveloped as a 7/11 convenience store. Cheung’s Food Mart existed from 1968 to 2008. Prior to that, it was founded in 1946 by Fred and Dorothy Robinson as the Surrey Centre Store, then sold in the 1950s to Barney and Kay Arnold. Under the Arnolds, the store also served as a single pump gas station and mailbox drop-off.

Facing Holland Park is a roadside fruit stand. They each call up two architectural structures that have all but disappeared from the lower mainland but were once common. Today, in many rural areas larger box stores are increasingly sited there. These artworks recall a simpler relationship to grocery shopping habits that is less syndicated and more localized. They also call up the importance of community formation within a limited geography. The artworks are not a judgement of what has become the present, but they do function as diachronic markers of the past and the present.

As is a feature of many of my works, the artwork includes the name of the proprietor. The proprietors are marked by difference, indicated by their surnames. In doing so, I want to call up the Fraser Valley as a historical and social geography differentiated by ethnicity and race. The scale and detail of the two sculptures deploy agricultural architecture in contrast with the present-day landscape of high-density land development spurred by inexorable economic and population change.”

–Ken Lum

Ken Lum is a Vancouver born artist presently residing in the Philadelphia area where he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a longtime Professor of Art at the University of British Columbia where he headed the Graduate Program in Studio Art. He has also served as Professor at Bard College and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris.

Ken Lum explores issues of identity, immigration, language and spatial politics through a wide range of media including photography, painting, sculpture, critical writing and curatorial projects. A co-founder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, he is a prolific writer with numerous published articles, catalogue essays and juried papers. In 2000, he worked as co-editor of the Shanghai Biennale catalog. As well, Lum has presented keynote addresses at the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics world conference in 2022 held in Philadelphia, the Becoming Public Art conference held in Markham, Ontario in 2020, the inauguration of the Melly Project Space in 2020 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the 2010 World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai, the third conference accompanying the 15th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia in 2006 and the Universities Art Association of Canada conference held in Vancouver in 1997. As an artist, he has a long and active art exhibition record of over 30 years, including major exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Busan Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Moscow Biennial, Whitney Biennial, among others. In 2019, Lum completed a feature length screenplay dealing with comparative racism in post-civil war America.

Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City. He is currently working on a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster for the Government of Cameroon. Related to his public art, he has written several essays on subject formation and public space. Lum’s public art often deals with individual and social identity formation in the context of historical trauma and the complications of official and non-official memory. In 2016, he completed a memorial to the Canadian war effort in Italy during World War 2. The work is sited in Nathan Phillips Square of Toronto City Hall and depicts the town of Ortona, Italy, in the aftermath of war while four soldiers stand sentinel at each corner of the low-perspective work.

Lum holds an honorary doctorate from his undergraduate alma mater, Simon Fraser University. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, a Hnatynshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award, a Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and is a Fellow of the Penn Institute of Urban Research. In late 2017, Lum was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. For Monument Lab, he was co-receiver of a Knight Foundation grant along with Paul Farber. In 2023, he garnered a Scotiabank Photography Award.