I WAIT UNTIL THE END OF MY INTERVIEW with Ken Lum to ask about a comparison he had made over a decade ago. In a 2011 interview, the eminent photographer had said, regarding the early days of his artistic practice: “To me, at the time, conceptual art was sort of like punk music. Anyone could become a punk musician. Conceptual art is open to any interested participant.” The analogy surprises me—conceptual art is often perceived as abstruse and elitist, in seeming contradiction to the punk ethos. Lum pauses for a second, looking a bit surprised by my quotation. He is as prolific a writer as he is an artist. Almost three decades of his personal and critical essays have been gathered together into a nearly 300-page collection entitled Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018. Lum casually mentions having enough material for another.
“This is a tricky question,” he begins answering. “I was a fauna and flora illustrator, drawing plants andesoteric for its own sake; it had a philosophical quest to dissect and explicate meaning in a complex world. It wasn’t reliant on the tainted, patriarchal Beaux-Arts system.”
