NEW YORK, NY.- Magenta Plains is presenting Ken Lum, a solo exhibition featuring four series of works: Photo-Mirrors II, Time And Again, Necrology, and Furniture Sculpture through to October 15th. Working in a variety of media over the last four decades including photography, sculpture, and installation, Lum’s art is concerned with how meanings are assigned to images, texts, and objects in everyday life that can be seen at the gallery’s new location in Chinatown (149 Canal Street).
The new gallery is gorgeous, with 15-foot ceilings in the space he is showing his work, three stories of unique wacky proportions, and is located on one of the most iconic blocks in New York City across from the Manhattan Bridge.
Ken is a playfully politically oriented academic, whose work is rooted in issues such as race, class, local capital and neoliberalism, while putting an ironic and even humorous spin on the art world. This is Vancouver-born, Philadelphia-based artist’s first show in NYC in 10 years!
The mirror is an important and recurring motif in Lum’s art, dating back to the mid-1990s. Photo Mirrors II meditates on the role of the image in the American landscape. Power, desire, violence, and spectacle are evoked by images screen-printed onto mirrored surfaces. The unscreened spaces remain as functioning mirrored surfaces, implicating the viewer within the narratives called up by the images themselves.
The combination of image and text in Time. And Again addresses what it means to work during a pandemic. The image component depicts highly plausible scenarios, while the text component, mantric in form, reveals the limits of speech in expressing the monotony and uncertainty within everyday life. The relationship between image and text demands of the viewer an oscillating attention between the two halves, generating a destabilizing effect on any possible readings.
Rendered in the style of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frontispieces, Necrology features fictionalized obituaries. As Lum has written:
"They read as real rather than as fact. The works are expressive rather than illustrative, didactic, or instrumental in the way that documentary photographs of a person may be. As in all my work, I am interested in the question of identity and its formation. But mostly, I hope for a reader lost in both the language and look of the overall image of the text".
Following the configurative logic of Minimal Art, Lum’s Furniture Sculpture highlights the silence of Minimal Art as a trope of inwardness in private life. This series of work, which dates back to the late 1970s and first realized when Lum was still an undergraduate student, speaks of the ways in which the social realm cannot be addressed directly or explicitly, but rather through a sublimated domestic ideal. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in a decade.
Ken Lum (b. 1956, Vancouver, Canada) is an artist best known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture, and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia. Lum has an extensive art exhibition record that includes Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions include the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Kunstmuseum Luzern in Lucerne, Switzerland, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lum has also served as a curator for several large-scale exhibitions, including “Shanghai Modern: 1919-1945,” “Sharjah Biennial 7,” and “Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia.” He was a project manager for the exhibition “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa: 1945 to 1994.” He was keynote speaker for the 15th Biennale of Sydney in 2006 and the World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai in 2010. He is Co-Founder and Chief Curatorial Advisor for Monument Lab. Lum has published extensively, including a book of his collected writings issued by Concordia University Press (2020) titled “Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018.
