The University of Pennsylvania School of Design is pleased to announce that Ken Lum has been appointed as Full Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Fine Arts program. He assumed responsibilities on July 1, 2012.

"In addition to a distinguished teaching record, Ken brings with him deep international experience of exhibitions and public art commissions and a thoughtful sensibility as a working artist. We look forward to his leadership as we build upon our vision for fine arts at Penn and explore how our programs will engage in projects that respond to the urban cultural world," said Marilyn Jordan Taylor, dean of PennDesign.

Lum, who is concerned with the dialectics of the private and public construction of identity, space and politics, is well-known as a conceptual artist for his work in photography and sculpture addressing the public realm.  He has participated in numerous major art exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Art Bienal, Sydney Biennale, Venice Biennale, the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the 2002 Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, the 2006 Liverpool Biennial, the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and Moscow Biennale 2011.

He has also led a notable career as an educator, teaching at the University of British Columbia, where he was Professor and Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art from 2000 to 2006. While at UBC (1990-2006), he also was a visiting Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris 1995 - 1997, a Graduate Professor at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College  from 2005 - 2007, 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.

Lum has also been involved in several large curatorial projects and has worked on numerous public art projects for the cities of Vienna, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto, Rotterdam, Vancouver, Stockholm and St. Moritz.