Curated by Michelle Jacques, Johan Lundh, and Xiaoyu Weng
WE LIVE IN A TIME of furniture without memories. Toni Morrison, in her novel The Bluest Eye (1970), describes this as “certainly no memories to be cherished.” Silent witnesses, our furnishings can evoke inarticulable yet visceral reactions: Take the sofa that arrived damaged, which one still pays for monthly, whose “joylessness stank,” to borrow Morrison’s words, is “pervading everything.” This object bears haunted traces of the indescribable circumstances surrounding our condition. Perhaps the truths of our existence lie furtively between the sad sunken couch and the overarching social architecture of racial capitalism, which whispers how and why dreams die.
Ken Lum’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “Death and Furniture,” begins with these philosophical certainties, only to unravel them. Through his “Furniture Sculptures,” 1978–, a series of mirror works and image-text pieces, Lum deftly conjures the larger social contexts and feelings that exceed language and representation. The show—which was curated by Michelle Jacques and Johan Lundh for the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, before coming to Toronto; the current iteration has been organized by AGO’s Xiaoyu Weng—presents a focused selection of Lum’s oeuvre from the past forty years, connecting recurrent threads within the artist’s practice: mortality, the instabilities of identity, and difference, filtered through the artist’s trademark acerbic humor.
A row of upturned gray-fabric couches cuts solemnly across a gallery like tombstones. Flanking them is “Time. And Again.,” 2021, a set of Lum’s repeated-text billboards, updated to address the anxieties exacerbated by our elongated pandemic and our cyclical “death while living.” The format’s tensions oscillate between what is seen and what is said, enacting our subjective interpretations to fill narrative gaps. The subjects portrayed are from diverse backgrounds: a young contract laborer waiting for their next gig, a freshly unemployed elder with a dog, parents struggling with the collapse of work-life boundaries at home. The billboard I know I’m lucky. I have a job, 2021, juxtaposes a picture of a masked, middle-aged white woman delivering online orders with the deadpan mantra I KNOW I’M LUCKY. I HAVE A JOB. I KNOW I’M LUCKY, I’M SO LUCKY. TO HAVE A JOB. The work’s jarring red letters on a blue background aggravate. Ironically, the delivery box’s logo reads FREE TO BE, the hollow slogan echoing the false promises of late-capitalist consumerism.
As social mirrors, Lum’s works map the difficulties of enduring psychological and emotional dead ends.
With so much death surrounding us, how, and whom, do we commemorate? Lum’s “Necrology Series,” 2016–17, a group of quasi-fictional obituaries designed in a florid nineteenth-century style, monumentalizes the lives of working-class people doomed by racial and global capitalism. The works’ overblown, eclectic typography and irregular kerning perform an absurd parody of traditional death notices, honoring the quotidian lives of people struggling to survive with few avenues for change. YASIR KHORSHED, reads one headline that arches dramatically in an Old Western typeface. Below it is a story about a man who fought tirelessly for garment workers’ rights, only to die at the age of thirty-four from cancer caused by benzene, an extremely toxic chemical used in the textile industry. The Most Unfortunate Case of Lucy Chona Santos, 2016, set in an archaic serif face, recounts how Lucy supported her family in Manila by gleaning valuable objects from garbage, only to be sentenced to death for smuggling heroin after being tricked by an international drug gang. Indeed, Lum does not allow those who have fallen through the cracks to be forgotten.
In Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression, 2002—an installation that deserves mention since it was in the Remai Modern presentation but unfortunately is not included here—we are confronted with ourselves, reflected and fragmented ad infinitum, with no clear exits. Thoughts caused by clinical depression—LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING, THERE IS NO FUTURE FOR ME—are etched onto the mirrors, recalling the all-too-familiar hopelessness produced by the pandemic and signaling humanity’s wider mental-health malaise. Similar to virtual spaces we’ve created to try and maintain connection and solidify our existence, Mirror Maze presciently warns of the digital realm’s disorientations and claustrophobic isolation. As social mirrors, Lum’s works map the difficulties of enduring psychological and emotional dead ends. Trapped within these echo chambers, unable to discern illusion from truth, self from other, who are we really projecting to? Could this fragmentation be a death of certain egoistic ideas of what it means to be human, offering another way through?
Joni Low is a writer, an independent curator, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.