SIGN LANGUAGE
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"I’m Tired"
Ken Lum, Phew, "I’m Tired," chromogenic print, aluminum, enamel, Sintra, 1994. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund. Photo: Tomas Svab, Vancouver Art Gallery.
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"We’ll see who gets the last laugh"
Ken Lum, "We’ll see who gets the last laugh," two mirrors mounted on coloured aluminum frame, 2002. Courtesy of Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.
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"Palace Shoes"
Ken Lum, "Palace Shoes," lacquer, acrylic sheet, aluminum, 2007. Collection of the artist.
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"Hanoi Travel"
Ken Lum, "Hanoi Travel," Plexiglas, powder coated aluminum, enamel, glue, plastic letters, 2000. Collection of Lothar Albrecht Galerie, Frankfurt and Private Collection, Japan.
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"Red Circle"
Ken Lum, "Red Circle," fabric, wood, 1986. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.
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"House of Realization"
Ken Lum, "House of Realization," 2007, installation with one way mirror and text, 2007. Collection of the artist.
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"I’m Tired"
Ken Lum, Phew, "I’m Tired," chromogenic print, aluminum, enamel, Sintra, 1994. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund. Photo: Tomas Svab, Vancouver Art Gallery.
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Ken Lum (photo by Mark Mushet)
SIGN LANGUAGE
Rediscovering Ken Lum's Vision of Vancouver.
BY: Beverly Cramp
Running diagonally across the Vancouver landscape, like a gash cutting through the orderly street grids that surround it, is Kingsway, one of the city’s major thoroughfares. Long the butt of urban planning jokes for its unruly commercial development, this ethnic, blue-collar neighbourhood was where conceptual artist Ken Lum spent many of his formative years. The liveliness of the place, reflecting the aesthetics of its mishmash of immigrant shopkeepers, continues to inspire his art practice of more than 30 years. And it’s reflected in a major retrospective of this work that opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery on February 12.
When Lum re-located to the area with his family in the 1960s, it was actually a step up in living standards. “I initially lived in [Vancouver’s] Strathcona neighbourhood,” he says. “It was also a multi-cultural place then, with Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, and Eastern Europeans mingling with Chinese, Japanese and First Nations. My mom hardly spoke a word of English and worked in a sweatshop.
“I used to watch her trying to communicate with others who didn’t speak English very well either, yet somehow they managed to communicate. It fascinated me to observe how language and identity worked. The trauma of penury was also deeply inscribed in me. Eventually, we advanced a bit economically and moved to Kingsway and Knight, which was more labour union-oriented and wealthier than Strathcona.”
Lum became friends with a next-door neighbour who was a professional sign-maker, working for many of the mom-and-pop businesses that operated on Kingsway, and he took on part-time work with him. It was a craft he used in other areas of his life.
“I was always painting signs and making high school posters,” he says. “I designed my class yearbook cover. The work bore a proximity to art, although I didn’t know anything about contemporary art at the time. But I always had the desire to create things with my hands.”
If Lum’s predilection for art was growing, so were his aspirations to advance beyond his working-class background. “I wanted to propel my mother and father out of poverty,” he recalls. “I remember saying to my mother, at the age of six, that one day I would bring them the better things in life.” At the beginning of his career, the need to get ahead materially took precedence over his creative urges.
He graduated from Simon Fraser University in 1980 with a science degree and began working at a pest control laboratory in Cloverdale. Though he did well, his growing discontent became too hard to ignore. “I made a lot of money there but I wasn’t happy in my job. One day the guy running the lab said to me that in a few years, the lab was going to be mine. That terrified me. I didn’t want that lab. So I decided to do something about it.”
Lum enrolled in an adult contemporary art evening class. The instructor was Jeff Wall. “Jeff was a novice teacher at that time. It was through him I met other artists like Ian Wallace and Rodney Graham. They introduced me to contemporary art. I was hostile towards it at first, and thought it was phony and pretentious. It challenged so many of my pre-conceptions. But the more I studied it, the more I began to feel free. It was an intangible I couldn’t put my finger on. I realized that I found this art exciting. It had lots of possibilities.”
Lum moved to New York to study in the Master of Arts program at New York University, and in 1985 returned to Vancouver to complete a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia. Throughout this period he produced art, using the influence of his upbringing in poor, ethnic areas as well and his fascination with language and identity.
Some of Lum’s earliest pieces were part of the Portrait Logos series — photographic works that combined faux personal logos with the type of commercial photography techniques common among family portrait photographers. Grant Arnold, curator of the VAG retrospective, describes the effect. “The logos were the kind normally associated with corporate entities, not with individuals,” he says. “They led viewers to imbue certain characteristics upon the individual.”
At the time, Lum was also making his series Furniture Sculptures, often made out of rented furniture pieces that also played off the domestic environment. “Both the photographic portraits and the sculptures referenced items from the domestic environment,” Arnold reflects. “Key to all the sculptural pieces is that access is blocked. You can never actually get into the central area of the structure and sit on the furniture. This refers partly to consumer culture, the idea of home decoration and how we define ourselves through the things we purchase and put into our homes. It also refers to ideas of how the role of the nuclear family is sometimes exclusive of others and that the consumer ideals of the home, held out in catalogues and advertising literature, are often unattainable.”
Lum’s Language Paintings and Image Text works also have a direct connection to the teeming commercialism of the Kingsway. “The Language Paintings often have exuberant images with letters that are completely nonsensical, they don’t form words,” Arnold says. “There’s a kind of recognizable syntax in them that’s taken from the world of advertising and posters. This engages the viewer with a sense of familiarity in the graphic character of the painting, but you can’t make any sense of the words. Ultimately you get lost.”
In an essay written for Lum’s exhibition at the Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery in 2000, author and poet Michael Turner says, “Language Paintings were no doubt influenced by the eight miles of commercial signage that line Vancouver’s oldest, longest and most-maligned thoroughfare: the multi-cultural, working-class Kingsway. After Lum and his family left Strathcona’s Chinatown, Kingsway became both their shopping district and cultural main drag...It was up to him to negotiate a world where photography studios share awnings with Pho Huts, where hardware stores and religious shops split the cost of a backlit three colour sign.”
Lum’s well-formed sense of humour and irony are easily found in his work. Turner says that growing up in not-so-well-to-do circumstances in East Vancouver is key to this aspect of Lum’s work. “Ken is an expert on humour — humour being a way to extricate oneself from life’s sticky situations, where something as benign as walking to the corner store with your allowance is akin to working for Brinks, but without the armoured car.”
Taken as a group, Lum’s association with Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Rodney Graham and later Roy Arden and Stan Douglas, was eventually to become known as the Vancouver school. It was not a name the artists gave to themselves (a curator did and the name stuck) however Lum recognizes the significance of their relationship. “We didn’t formally create art together, but we knew each other and were influenced by each other. In the classic Greek sense of a philosophical school, we did share an attitude and exchange ideas.”
Vancouver as a subject is one of the main connections between the group members, one that Lum acknowledges. “It is important to theorize the place we come from,” says Lum. “That’s the context we know best. The interesting thing about art is that when you do it, you don’t realize until it’s done, how much the result is a function of how much it expresses the terms that generate it.”
Ken Lum is on at the Vancouver Art Gallery February 12 to September 25, 2011.
Vancouver Art Gallery
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