Ken Lum
Ken Lum (born in Vancouver in 1956) employs a complex repertoire of artistic strategies in his work. He combines images and texts, display elements and language, and uses these aspects to showcase how identity is formed through the overlap between different systems of signs. In formal terms, Lum draws on the aesthetics of common advertising formats, such as billboards, using their vocabulary of typography, slogans, and images. Contrary to the functional language of advertising, however, Lum confronts the viewers with ambivalent messages, inviting them to look beyond the glossy surface to the fears and contradictions involved in a globalized world where disparate traditions meet.
artwork
Coming Soon, 2009
Billboard, 400 x 390 cm
At first glance, Ken Lum’s work Coming Soon, on Munich’s Max-Mannheimer-Platz, seems like a conventional advertising panel. A modern European- Asian nuclear family smiles down from a large billboard, seemingly embodying the perfect image of multiculturalism. Mobility, progress, and cosmopolitanism are just some of the possible associations prompted by the appearance of the three people featured. Drawing on the marketing aesthetics used in urban campaigns for stores or development projects that are soon to open, a slogan printed in English and Chinese announces something to come soon. But what? The seemingly positive and direct message of the text is quite ambivalent: Is it a promise – or a threat?
Ken Lum
Ken Lum (born in Vancouver in 1956) employs a complex repertoire of artistic strategies in his work. He combines images and texts, display elements and language, and uses these aspects to showcase how identity is formed through the overlap between different systems of signs. In formal terms, Lum draws on the aesthetics of common advertising formats, such as billboards, using their vocabulary of typography, slogans, and images. Contrary to the functional language of advertising, however, Lum confronts the viewers with ambivalent messages, inviting them to look beyond the glossy surface to the fears and contradictions involved in a globalized world where disparate traditions meet.
artwork
Coming Soon, 2009
Billboard, 400 x 390 cm
At first glance, Ken Lum’s work Coming Soon, on Munich’s Max-Mannheimer-Platz, seems like a conventional advertising panel. A modern European- Asian nuclear family smiles down from a large billboard, seemingly embodying the perfect image of multiculturalism. Mobility, progress, and cosmopolitanism are just some of the possible associations prompted by the appearance of the three people featured. Drawing on the marketing aesthetics used in urban campaigns for stores or development projects that are soon to open, a slogan printed in English and Chinese announces something to come soon. But what? The seemingly positive and direct message of the text is quite ambivalent: Is it a promise – or a threat?