Ken Lum
dal 19/3/2015 al 26/10/2015
Segnalato da
19/3/2015
Ken Lum
Kunsthalle Wien, Wien
Ken Lum combines photographic images and texts, language and sculptural elements in order to question class affiliation and ethnic diversity in Western society, as well as the presentation of individuality within a socially and economically coded urban space.
Curated by: Anne Faucheret
Coming Soon is the title of Ken Lum’s new work, which he realises in the public
space at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. 5m x 4m in size and facing traffic at the busy
Karlsplatz, at first glance Coming Soon functions like a commercial advertising
billboard – only when one looks closer it becomes recognizable as an artistic
intervention. In the manner of advertising campaigns by large mobile telephone
providers or for upcoming film premieres, an imminent realization is promised. But
the realization of what, one wonders. What is being advertised here?
The billboard depicts the classical constellation of the modern nuclear family: father,
mother, child. But the image is in a contemporary formulation that seems to present
itself as the perfect product of multiculturalism. As the smallest unit of society, the
family has become the object of various transformations during modernity, and thus
the focal point of socio-political debates. The slogan “Coming Soon”, integrated by
the artist into the image, implies the announcement of a not-so-distant utopia. And
thus he gives the image its critical dimension: only superficially does the wording
constitute an announcement, and on closer examination it presents criticism of a
purely political rhetoric.
Ken Lum works on the boundary between criticism, utopia and affirmation, between
concept art, pop art and non-art, and he is no stranger to Vienna, either:
In 2000, at the invitation of “museum in progress” he installed the work There is no
place like home on the facade of Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. Here too he works with
combinations of image and text – this time showing people that lay claim to a home
or a homeland in an aggressive to desperate tone. The work was conceived as an
answer to the rise of right-wing political parties in Europe, with the local context
provided by the election of the conservative/far-right government in Austria.
In 2006, as the winner of an international competition organized by KÖR Kunst
im öffentlichen Raum, Ken Lum designed the media installation Pi in the west
passageway of the Karlsplatz metro station. In the passageway, which is fully
mirrored, statistical data relating to globally or locally relevant themes such as
population growth and migration, but also the consumption of schnitzels in Vienna,
are constantly updated and displayed. Day after day pedestrians pass the ever-
changing arrays of figures. The installation demonstrates Ken Lum’s strategy of
superimposing one’s own mirror image and a prosaic description of society through
the presentation of data quantities, which are of questionable information value.
And it is precisely in the interference patterns between the seemingly authentic but
evanescent self-image and the highly coded but equally unfathomable numbers
that the fragility of both knowledge systems is revealed.
Ken Lum’s works came to prominence in the 1980s, as part of the “Vancouver
School” that grew around artists such as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and Rodney
Graham. The group adopted a critical attitude trying to reveal the “repressed social
content” of conceptual or abstract art by using the medium of photography.
His work comprises a complex repertoire of artistic strategies. Through various
methods such as performances in public space, sculptures with borrowed furniture,
portrait photography in studio quality to which he adds garish colour codes,
lettering and fake logos, through a diverse use of mirrors and in numerous typeface
series he shows how identity arises in the superimposition and collision of semiotic
systems. His works make reference to a globalization based on economic, cultural
and colonial grounds. He employs typography, slogans and motifs to quote from
the jargon of advertising statements and their communicative messages, which
are aimed chiefly at an urban public. However, part of Ken Lum’s strategy is to
confront this impersonal language, aimed at facilitating the global circulation, with
the images and inner monologues of individuals who seem to live at the edges and
in the niches of this system. By this means he subtly manipulates the mechanisms
of the consumer society to make visible the fears and contradictions of a globalized
world in which disparate traditions collide.
Image: Ken Lum. Coming Soon
Press Contact:
Katharina Murschetz
+43 (0) 1 5 21 89 - 1221
katharina.murschetz@kunsthallewien.at
Opening: Friday March 20, 2015, 7 pm
Kunsthalle Wien GmbH
Museumsplatz 1>
1070 Vienna, Austria