If bad art is esoteric and ostentatious, “Death and Furniture” epitomized excellence. The exhibition, a five-oeuvre anthology of Ken Lum’s career, testified to the philosophical potency of everyday objects and popular culture. Allegorizing mortality with artifacts of lifestyle and leisure, Lum posed deft questions about social class construction, intersectional subjecthood, and temporal recursion throughout history.
Lum’s text-based series (2017–) and (2002) ushered visitors inward with quasi-historical obituaries. In, archival inks, predominantly in blacks and reds, impress text and decorative elements onto ivory-colored paper. Each line features a new serif font and ample typographic emphases. The Victorian ornamentalism, extreme typographic variation, and social realism reference the Industrial Revolution. The accounts, however, are anachronistic assemblages of fact and fiction pieced together by Lum.
