EVERYTHING IS RELEVANT

Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018

Ken Lum

Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018 brings together texts by Canadian artist Ken Lum. They include a letter to an editor, diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, curatorial statements, and more. Along the way, the reader learns about late modern, postmodern, and contemporary art practices, as well as debates around issues like race, class, and monumentality. Penetrating, insightful, and often moving, Lum’s writings are essential for understanding his practice, which has been prescient of developments within contemporary art, as well as the international art world over the last three decades. Kitty Scott, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) and the co-curator of a 2002-03 NGC retrospective of Lum's photography, contributed the introduction.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Melva J. Dwyer Award, Everything is Relevant has been reviewed by a number of outlets including Momus, C Magazine, Art Margins Online, Ormsby Review, Border Crossings, Camera Austria, The Capilano Review, and Galleries West, and it has also received coverage from NPR, CBC Radio's Q, Macleans, and the Globe and Mail.

Order the Print Edition

January 2020
$64.95 CAD | $64.95 USD
Series: Text/Context: Writings by Canadian Artists

290 pages | 7 x 8 1/2

9781988111001 | Paper

9781988111025 | E-book

**Use code "LUM20" at checkout to save 20% off the cover price**

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Endorsements

'When I put together a show with works of the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1995, I was fortunate to find there Ken Lum’s “Melly Shum Hates Her Job,” a work he had made for the inauguration of Witte de With, a non-profit art centre in the same city. For me this was the first of many rich encounters with him and his works. Over many decades he has pointedly challenged ruling classes in many regions of the world, religious suppression, racism and other horrors. Driven by a deep sense of humanity, his engagement, backed by a wide knowledge of history and pertinent literature, is reflected in his thoughtful writings on art and life. As he correctly says: Everything is relevant.'
-Hans Haacke

'Lum is a keen and prescient observer of the art world and of global society more broadly. He is one of the most significant art writers of our time.'
-Mark A. Cheetham, University of Toronto; author of Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s

'Lum’s natural and clear writing is an integral part of his existence. Not just ‘an artist who CAN write,’ he is rare in his seamless narration of idea and experience, his challenge of hierarchical ideas of value, place, and time. Descriptive and disruptive, personal and political, critical and loving, Lum conveys a broad, sophisticated, but level-headed relationship to art seen and made, and life lived at every level.'
-Sacha Craddock, art writer, critic, and curator

'While the writings in this volume obliquely elucidate the thinking process that informs Ken Lum's artistic production and provide interesting interpretations of the art of the artists they feature, they also represent contemporary art’s gasping for air in the context of the increasing pressure from what in the past thirty or so years has come to be defined as the globalization of the art world. As such, the texts stand as important historical documents of what was at stake in art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.'
-Alexander Alberro, Barnard College/Columbia University; author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity

1991–2000
Preface	Ken Lum	xxvii
Introduction Ken Lum Loves to Write: Twenty-Seven Years of Essays, Reviews, and Critical Texts	Kitty Scott	xxxii
Carnegie Library Project, 1991		2
Homes, 1993		8
Soft Landing, 1995		11
The Difference Between Art and Fact, 1995		13
Seven Moments in the Life of a Chinese Canadian Artist, 1997		19
6: New Vancouver Modern, 1998		23
The Ambivalent Gaze of Thomas Ruff, 1998		28
Dak’Art 98, The Dakar Biennale, 1998		31
On Board The Raft of the Medusa, 1999		35
Untitled, 1999		42
Canadian Cultural Policy: A Problem of Metaphysics, 1999		44
The London Art Diaries, 1999–2000		59
2001–2010
Inaugural Editorial, 2002		92
Prix de Rome Commentary, 2003		98
Aesthetic Education in Republican China: A Convergence of Ideals, 2004		104
Should Artists Be Curating the Next Documenta?, 2004		118
Surprising Sharjah, 2005		121
Art and Ethnology: A Relationship in Ironies, 2005		130
Unfolding Identities, 2005		138
Contemporary Art Within and Without Institutions, 2005		144
Gentle Indifference: The Art of Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, 2006		148
Something’s Missing, 2006 156		156
Encountering Chen Zhen: A Paris Portal, 2007		164
Visuality and Opticality in the Art of Tania Mouraud, 2009		176
Dear Steven, 2009		179
To Say or Not to Say, 2009		188
Barthes in Beijing, 2009		196
Melly Shum Hates Her Job but Not the Witte de With, 2010		198
Hope in Saint-Roch, 2010		203
2011–2018
The City of Brotherly Love, 2012 209		209
From Analog to Digital: A Consideration of Photographic Truth, 2012		213
Canadian Identity Debates Are Broken. Let’s Fix Them. 2013		224
Looking Up, 2013		228
Ian Wilson: From Chalk Circle to Full Circle, 2013		234
Some Reflections on Urban Public Art Today, 2014		246
Living in America, 2016		251
The Other in the Carpet, 2016		255
On Monument Lab, 2018		264
Tracking Colonialism from Delhi to Toronto: Edward VII in Queen’s Park, 2018		270
Me and Mel Chin, 2018		276
Eternal Glory to the People’s Heroes! On Beijing’s Monument to the People’s Heroes, 2018		280

On May 23, Concordia University Press hosted artist Ken Lum and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Kitty Scott in a Zoom conversation. The conversation was moderated by Press director Geoffrey Robert Little. This in-depth discussion marked the recent publication of Lum’s book Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018. The book brings together Ken Lum’s texts and includes a letter to an editor, diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, curatorial statements, and more. Penetrating, insightful, and often moving, Lum’s writings are essential for understanding his practice, which has been predictive of developments within contemporary art, as well as the international art world over the last three decades. Kitty Scott contributed an introduction through which to encounter Lum's texts.

About the Author

Vancouver-born artist Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture, and photography. He currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and he previously taught at Bard College and at the University of British Columbia. As an artist, he has exhibited at Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie International, and Whitney Biennial, among others. He is a co-founder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and in 2000 he worked as co-editor of the Shanghai Biennale. He is co-curator of Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project in Philadelphia. In 2017, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. He is the recipient of the 2019 Gershon Iskowitz Prize and a 2020 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Kitty Scott is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). She has held positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Banff Centre, the Serpentine Galleries, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Edmonton Art Gallery (currently known as the Art Gallery of Alberta). Ms. Scott curated the critically-acclaimed exhibition Brian Jungen: Friendship Centre (2019) at the AGO and co-curated the well-received 2018 Liverpool Biennial, titled Beautiful World, Where Are You? In 2002-03 she co-curated a retrospective at the NGC of Ken Lum’s photography.

EVERYTHING IS RELEVANT