The elevated train ride into the downtown core of Vancouver, Canada, passes through an industrial zone dotted with garment manufacturers and auto body shops. At Clark Drive and East 6th Avenue, amid the buildings and streetlights, is a cross composed of light-emitting diodes bearing the words 'East Van'.
The eye-catching structure, titled Monument for East Vancouver, is by Canadian artist Ken Lum. The City of Vancouver invited Lum to make the piece as part of the Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Programme in 2010. It is his eighth public art commission.
Lum has been showing internationally since 1982, and has exhibited at Documenta in Germany and numerous biennials, museums, art spaces and galleries, including in Hong Kong. Lum, who features in an exhibition in Hong Kong later this month, is known for work that explores language, identity and perception through everyday objects such as furniture, signs and portraits.
When I visit him at his new studio, he has a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a survey that includes documentation of performances done in the late 1970s and more recent large-scale mirror maze installations.
Despite displaying an early aptitude for drawing, Lum, who was born in Vancouver in 1956, had not considered art to be a viable career path. 'As a kid, I always liked to draw. I was quite good at drawing naturally. I was never trained, unfortunately,' he says. 'I never thought there was such a thing as being an artist possible in my future.'
Money was a concern during his childhood. 'My mother worked in a sweatshop. Even as a kid I was going out to the farms and picking potatoes and strawberries, when I was six - the whole summer.' He later did illustrations of flora and fauna for the British Columbia government, and also illustrated posters for the Vancouver library system and a local hospital. Still, he believed then his future was in sciences.
For his undergraduate degree, he attended Simon Fraser University in Burnaby to study pestology. '[It's] a kind of an intersection between chemistry, I guess, and pesticide research,' he says. 'Mainly on pheromone research - trying to decipher these kinds of organic compounds that make up a type of smell that pest insects emit. So we were trying to create types of pheromones that misled pest insects to be attracted to it, infect them in a way that causes them to not be able to procreate.'
