As part of World Portrait series comprised of seven canvasses, Ken Lum’s Skateboarder (for example) combines and holds in tension two contrary artistic impulses.  The white monochromes signal an endpoint to painting as an uninflected surface that refuses all reference and representation to arrive at a condition of pure painting.  The small black and white pictures punctuate the monochrome like musical notation.  They are casual snapshots in black and white that evoke mid-20th-century journalism or surveillance images, and are cropped depictions of everyday activities in public spaces.  The canvas can be likened to an enlarged page with the isolated figures becoming objects for contemplation and meditation.  Ken Lum notes the relationship of their composition to the page in this way:

The series came out of my habit of just meandering through the streets.  I often feel a simultaneous engagement/estrangement from my environment.  I often look for patterns in social formations, not so much typologies.  There is something emptying about city life, as much as I often enjoy city life.  I saw these works as something to do with seeing people doing certain things such as waiting or sitting or checking their watches or looking bored or looking tired, etc.  It developed out of a book I did for Imschoot Uitgevers of Ghent, Belgium.  The book is called “Speculations”.  Some with the art book and artist’s editions store Art Metropole wrote the following about it, which I liked: “Conceptual humanist Lum poses rhetorical questions coupled with images of modern life in a Zen-like simplicity. On each piece of crisp white paper there is a small black and white photograph of a person or persons, beside each image is a question about who they are or could be.  In addition are grey squares toward the end of the book with accompanying questions that suggest a challenge to our perceptions. Ponder for one second or for one day.