Ken Lum is a contemporary artist born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1956. Ken is known for his politically engaged, conceptual and representational work in a number of media, including large-scale public art and architectural projects, painting, sculpture, and photography.
Ken has a long and active art exhibition record of over 30 years, including major exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Shanghai Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, to name but a few. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions around the globe, including in Vienna, Rotterdam, Toronto and Vancouver. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hnatynshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award and is a Penn Institute of Urban Research Fellow. In 2017, Ken was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada and, in 2018, he was granted a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Most recently, Ken won the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for his outstanding contribution to Canadian visual arts. A long-time professor, he is currently the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia, where he currently resides.
