Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Professor Lum is the instructor for the SNF Paideia designated course, “The Chinese Body and the Production of Space in Chinatown.” The course “takes as its topic the imagining and reimagining of the Chinese body by dominant white culture from the 19th century through to today,” said Lum in an article by Penn Today.
Outside of the pithy narrative of Chinese contract laborers building the railroads, the place of the Chinese in American history remains an understudied and undertheorized topic in America’s foundational stories.
From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.
Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; authored an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch; and published Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 to 2018, Concordia University Press, in January 2020. Lum is also a co-founder of the Monument Lab.
Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919–1945 (2005).
Lum has exhibited widely, including São Paulo Biennial (1998), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), and the Gwangju Biennale (2008), Moscow Biennial 2011 and the Whitney Biennial 2014. He has published many essays on art.
He has also realized permanent public art commissions for the cities of Vienna, Vancouver, Utrecht, Leiden, St. Moritz, Toronto, and St Louis.
[The other article to link to is: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/cultivating-robust-civil-dialogue-during-times-unrest]