Art Metropole

#14482

Everything is Relevant : Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018

Artist

Ken Lum

Date

2020

Publisher

Concordia University Press

Format

Anthologies

ISBN

9781988111001

Size

28 × 19 cm

Length

320 

Genre

Arts Writing, Contemporary Art, Canadian

Ken Lum is arguably one of Canada’s most important contemporary artists. Born and raised in Vancouver, Lum now lives in the Philadelphia area, where he is Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. He works across painting, sculpture, and photography and many of his public pieces, including Melly Shum Hates Her Job and Monument for East Vancouver, have achieved iconic status. Since the early 1990s Lum has had an active and diverse writing practice. This collection brings together scattered texts including diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, lectures, curatorial interventions, and more, illuminating Lum’s development as an artist, teacher, scholar, and curator.

Kitty Scott, the co-curator of a 2002-03 retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada of Lum’s photography, has written an introduction that provides context, background, and a lens through which to engage with Lum’s texts.

Penetrating, insightful, and often moving, Ken Lum’s writings explore not just his practice, but contemporary art as well as questions of belonging, race, cultural nationalism, gentrification, and the role of the artist in an ever-changing world. Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018 is required reading for anyone interested in Lum and in the international art scene over the last thirty years.

Softcover, b/w.