Artist Ken Lum. Courtesy of Ken Lum.

“I don’t like being a prisoner to the art market,” artist Ken Lum tells Observer. One of the most celebrated contemporary artists hailing from Canada, Lum has enjoyed a multifaceted career—he’s an artist who works in paint and sculpture, a writer, a curator, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founding editors of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His works, which have been exhibited around the world in museums and biennials, often critique the socio-political structures of class and racial identities in contemporary societies.

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Lum takes a unique stance as a teacher and mentor for young artists. He sees teaching as an extension of his artistic practice, but he also simply enjoys being in the classroom because it allows him to reacquaint himself with the purpose of art, forcing him to reread and rethink things in an environment where the dialogue of art and culture can be fraught.

He has, he says, a longstanding skepticism about the art world. “I entered art thinking it was a much more lofty idealistic pursuit, but there are many aspects of the art world that I am not comfortable with. I don’t like being a prisoner of the art market. We always look at art as for the common good when the reality of the art world is in many ways parallel to many other worlds. It’s also a social field where you have to learn how you negotiate yourself.”

Lum’s writings, which cover a striking range of topics from Pazyryk carpet styles to Asian American histories, express deeper concerns. In Art and Ethnology: A Relationship in Ironies (2005), Lum wrote that the “game of art today is rather like the case of Don Quixote,” reflecting on the institutionalization of contemporary art and the museum as both cultural infrastructure and a social space. In the 1970s, when he started making art, the art world was opened up to different constituencies, such as conceptual art, that challenged the status quo of art and institutions. Among them, the most eminent criticism of art was in terms of the most prominent material form: paintings. In contrast, Lum notes a return of paintings in the art market: “Nowadays more than 90 percent of the contemporary artworks displayed in galleries are paintings,” he says, which shows a returning taste of painting among collectors that diverged from the turn to conceptualism in the ’70s.

The pursuit of art beyond the institutional framework is prominent in Lum’s works, both in galleries and in public. When asked about the key message he expresses to young artists who are navigating their careers in the institutional landscape, he says, “We all know that institutional frames define part of art. I try to........

© Observer