Monument for East Vancouver
by Ken Lum

Clark Drive & East 6th Avenue

Vancouver artist Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver is a large-scale version of a street image that has circulated in East Vancouver for decades: a crossword of VAN EAST using the common “A”. With the entire cross-shaped text outlined in white LED lights, the installation has multiple associations, including religion and irreverence, and is an assertion of eastside identity.

The work, located at the crest of East 6th Avenue at Clark Drive, can be seen from significant vantage points to the west.

“[The crossword] signifies the identity of those living in the eastern part of the city and is often accompanied with the word “rules”. [This] is ironic, as traditionally those in the west of the city have held the economic and political power, though the real estate boom more recently has rendered the boundary between east and west more fluid. The piece monumentalizes a rearguard gesture of defiance, protest, and assertion of identity.”

-- Ken Lum

Artist Biography

Ken Lum's art is concerned with the dialectics of the private and public construction of identity, space and politics. Born in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work, Lum is well-known internationally for his work in sculpture, painting and photography. He has participated in numerous international art exhibitions, including the Sydney Biennale, Venice Biennale, Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany and more recently, the 2007 Istanbul Biennial and 2008 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.

Lum has also led a distinguished career as an educator, teaching at the University of British Columbia, where he was Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art from 2000 to 2006 and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, among other educational institutions. He has published widely and is the Founding Editor of Yishu: The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Lum was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999 and awarded a Killam Award for Outstanding Research in 1998 and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2007.

He is presently working on two major public art commissions in Berlin and in Utrecht, Holland. Monument for East Vancouver is his third public art commission in Vancouver.

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