Ken Lum is a Canadian artist living in the Philadelphia area where is serves as the Marilyn J Taylor Penn Presidential Professor in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
He has a long and distinguished exhibition record spanning four decades, and that include Documenta II, the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo Bienal, the Shanghai Biennale, the Carnegie Triennial, the Moscow Biennial and Istanbul Biennial.
He is also an active writer, having published many catalog essays and juried paper publications. A book of his writings, Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 to 2018 was recently published by Concordia University Press to much critical acclaim. He is co-founder and founding editor of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.
Lum has been the recipient of many prestigious national and international awards including the Officer of the Order of Canada, 2017, Pew Fellowship, 2018, Gershwin Iskowitz Prize, 2020, and the Governor General’s Award in the Visual Arts, 2020.
He was keynote speaker in 2020 at the opening of the Melly Contemporary Art Space in Rotterdam, the 2010 World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai as well as keynote speaker for the 15th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia.
Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on several permanent public art commissions including for 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.
Lum was co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 7, Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 and Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project in 2017. He was curatorial advisor and lead researcher for West Africa for the exhibition, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 to 1991.