Detail: Offsite: Ken Lum is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and funded by the City of Vancouver through the Public Art Program. This project is supported by Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and the residents at Shangri-La. The Gallery deeply appreciates support for Offsite: Ken Lum from the Michael O'Brian Family Foundation. Offsite Ken Lum project is curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art.
Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum’s critical and engaging work calls into question the relationship between modernism and everyday lived experience, often blurring the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics.
Over the past 25 years, Lum has exhibited widely throughout North America, Europe and Asia, utilizing a variety of media and methods. For Offsite, the Gallery’s public art space in downtown Vancouver, the artist is creating new work based on huts that were erected on the Maplewood mudflats in North Vancouver during the second half of the twentieth century. Scale models of these structures appear to float over the surface of a reflecting pond, creating a marked juxtaposition between their makeshift construction and the surrounding architecture, while evoking the utopian character of the mudflat community in the seemingly inexorable advance of urban development.