Essay Published in: ART SCHOOL: PROPOSITIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, MIT Press, Ed. Steven Henry Madoff, October, 2009 © Ken Lum and MIT Press Dear Steven, I am sorry but I cannot seem to be able to get a proper handle on what I want to say. Much of this has to do with a […]

Published for the Vienna Kunsthalle in the posthumous retrospective catalog on the work of Chen Zhen, 2007 I first met Chen Zhen in 1995. I was living in Paris and teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While there I was introduced to a number of Chinese artists and curators who had immigrated to France. They […]

Located on a hilltop just outside of Vicenza, an Italian town designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sits the Villa Rotonda designed by the sixteenth century architect Andrea Palladio. On a recent visit to the site I was struck by how the building and its location cater to a particular type of vision. The […]

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, IN DAKAR, SENEGAL, on the occasion of Dak’Art, the largest art biennial in West Africa, I was on Gorée Island, a short ferry ride from Dakar, a place developed during the 17th century as an administrative post for the embarkation of slaves destined for the Americas. For more than three centuries, European […]

Tania Mouraud (b. Paris, 1942) has consistently pursued the relationship between the body and opticality in her art. Her Borderland (2008) series comprises landscapes that have been photographed with a filter made out of the same transparent plastic that is used to bale hay. The result is an image of the landscape that is unevenly […]

In preparing for Shanghai Modern, the curators, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Zheng Shengtian and I, paid several visits to the West Lake (Xi Hu) city of Hangzhou, two and a half hours by train west of Shanghai. One of six capital cities in the long history of China, Hangzhou was the national capital during the Southern […]

Published in: On Cultural Influence: Collected Papers from apexart International Conferences 1999-2006 Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris, published by apexart ISBN: 1-933347-11-2 paperback, 304 pages 27 bw illustrations Release date: October 2006 A quip from former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King contends that too much geography rather than too little history afflict Canada. […]