1. Since 2012, Ken Lum has taught as a Professor of Fine Art in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
62 Facts About Ken Lum
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Ken Lum attended Admiral Seymour Elementary, Lord Selkirk Elementary and Gladstone Secondary School.
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Ken Lum received an MFA from University of British Columbia in 1985.
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Ken Lum is represented by the New York City gallery Magenta Plains, Galerie Nagel-Draxler, Royale Projects, and Misa Shin Gallery.
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From 2000 to 2006, Ken Lum was Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art at the University of British Columbia, where he had taught since 1990, resigning in 2006.
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Ken Lum joined the faculty of Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2005 and worked at Bard until 2007.
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Ken Lum taught at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1995 to 1997 while taking leave from UBC.
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Ken Lum guest taught a semester at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste or Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China, the l'Ecole d'Arts Plastique in Fort de France, Martinique.
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Ken Lum led several so-named Master Classes at the Banff Centre.
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In 2012, Ken Lum joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia.
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In 2003, Ken Lum was honored with the Distinguished University Professor Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative and Performing Arts.
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Ken Lum was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007.
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In 2011, Ken Lum received an ArtMoves Special Award from the City of Torun, Poland.
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In 2015, Ken Lum was awarded an Honoris Causa Doctorate degree from Simon Fraser University, his undergraduate alma mater.
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In 2018, Ken Lum was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
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In 2019, Ken Lum was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Award and in 2020 a Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
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Ken Lum was awarded the Monument Lab Changemaker Award during a ceremony at the Independence Visitor Center in Philadelphia.
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In 2024, Ken Lum was conferred a King Charles III Coronation Medal by David Eby, the premier of British Columbia, Canada.
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Ken Lum participated in the Carnegie International 1991, Sydney Biennale in 1995, the Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 1997, and the Shanghai Biennale in 2000 where he helped edit the exhibition catalog, and at Documenta XI in 2002.
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Ken Lum participated and gave a presentation at the Moscow Biennale 2011.
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Ken Lum has participated in numerous public committees throughout his career.
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Ken Lum served as the director of the then-non-funded Or Gallery from 1982 to 1984 and was a member of the City of Vancouver's Public Art Committee from 1994 to 1996.
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Ken Lum sat on the board of directors for the Or Gallery from 1992 to 1994, and he was a board member with the Arts Initiative Tokyo in Japan from 2001 to 2008.
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Ken Lum served on the board of the Annie Wong Art Foundation in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2002 and on Centre A: Center for Asian Art 2002 to 2007.
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From 2003 to 2004, Ken Lum was a member of the Vancouver Art Gallery's Master Planning Committee.
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Ken Lum served as a board member of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in from 2011 to 2012.
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In 2003, Ken Lum was a juror for the Prix de Rome prize in the Netherlands, specifically for the category of Art in Public Space at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, for which he wrote the accompanying essay for the publication on the prize.
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In 2008, Ken Lum acted as a juror for the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in Beijing to which he wrote an essay on the winning artist Liu Wei and juror for the New Contemporaries Exhibition in London, UK.
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Ken Lum was a juror of the inaugural Lola Award for Contemporary Dance in 2012.
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From 2013 to 2015, Ken Lum was a board member of CACHET, a three-year project of the University of Toronto's University College Canadian Studies program.
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In 2015, Ken Lum was a juror for the Jerome Emerging Artists Fellowship in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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In 2019, Ken Lum participated as a juror for the 9.4 billion USD King Salman Park project in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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Ken Lum was a Toronto Biennial of Art board member from 2020 to 2023.
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Ken Lum was the keynote speaker at the 1997 Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference.
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In 2010, Ken Lum was the keynote speaker at the annual CIMAM World Museums conference held at the Shanghai Art Museum in Shanghai, China.
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In 2022, Ken Lum was the keynote speaker at the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics conference hosted by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Ken Lum was the keynote speaker at the 2023 Canadian Arts Conference at Koerner Hall, the University of Toronto.
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In 2024, Ken Lum gave the keynote address for the Annual Karl Duldig Lecture on Sculpture in Melbourne, Australia.
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From 1999 to 2001, Ken Lum wrote an online journal for LondonArt, which chronicled both his passion for and concerns about art.
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Ken Lum has authored many essays covering a range of topics on art and culture, including the relationship between art and ethnology for the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands, as well as the art of Chen Zhen for the Kunsthalle Wien.
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In 2008, Ken Lum completed an art book project with French philosopher Hubert Damisch, titled Ultimo Bagaglio, published by Three Star Books in Paris.
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In 2009, Ken Lum contributed an essay addressing the challenges facing art education today for Art School: published by MIT Press.
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Ken Lum presented a paper on the work of conceptual artist Ian Wilson at the Dia Art Foundation in New York.
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In 2016, Ken Lum contributed a catalog essay for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
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In 2022, Ken Lum wrote a second screenplay centered on the 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory.
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Ken Lum was Director of the non-profit and then non-funded Or Gallery in Vancouver from 1982 to 1984.
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In 2001, Ken Lum was part of a team that founded a Humanities 101 educational lectures program for low-income people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
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Ken Lum was an advisor for The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 to 1994, a 2001 exhibition conceived and curated by Okwui Enwezor.
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Ken Lum was curator of the 2004 NorthWest Annual for the Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle.
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Ken Lum contributed an essay for the exhibition on Aesthetic Education in China.
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In 2015, along with Paul Farber and A Will Brown, Lum co-conceived and co-curated Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, a public art and urban research project sited in the courtyard of Philadelphia City Hall.
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In Vienna in 2000, Ken Lum realized a 540 square meter work on the side of the centrally located Kunsthalle Wien for the non-profit art initiative museum in progress.
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The work, There is no place like home, generated controversy as Ken Lum saw the work as a response to the growth of the extreme right in Europe.
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Ken Lum realized a second permanent public art commission outside St Moritz, Switzerland in 2003 that dealt with the declining Romansch way of life in the remote Engadine region of Switzerland.
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In 2005, Ken Lum completed A Tale of Two Children: A Work for Strathcona, a permanent work commissioned by the City of Vancouver's Public Works Yard.
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In 2011, Ken Lum realized a permanent public art commission for the city of Utrecht, Netherlands.
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In early 2010, Ken Lum completed Monument for East Vancouver, colloquially known as the East Van Cross, an outdoor artwork located in the traditionally working-class side of Vancouver.
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In mid-2010, Ken Lum won a public art commission for Across Time and Space, Two Children of Toronto Meet in Toronto, Ontario completed in 2013.
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Late in 2010, Ken Lum was selected as the lead artist on the design team for the new Walterdale Bridge replacement scheduled for construction from 2013 to 2017 in Edmonton, Alberta.
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Ken Lum completed in 2013 public art commissions premised on the tragic-historical figures of Homer Plessy and Dred Scott as a connecting narrative between the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St Louis, Missouri and Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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In 2016, Ken Lum completed a memorial dedicated to the Canadian war effort in Italy during World War II.
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Ken Lum won a commission in 2016 to design a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon.