Ken Lum

Beneath an apparant celebration of social integration, Lum’s Signs - for a motel, a restaurant, a hairdresser’s - expose the ramifications of the systematic displacement of peoples. They mime the real signs found in those working class areas on the edge of any city and often populated by people from some of the most devastated parts of the world. Seducing the viewer by their festive air, Lum's signs’ textual charge ignites a discourse that is at once universal (globalization and mass migrations) and personal (individual lives and ethnicity). But Lum raises doubts and seems to leave them unresolved. Are the signs real or fictional? The views are real, but whose are they - and who are they for? With 30 color illustrations.