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Ken Lum 林蔭庭
Untitled (Zainub) 無題 (Zainub)
1984
This work is from Vancouver-born artist Ken Lum’s early Portrait-Logo series, which combines traditional portrait photographs with logos, slogans, and other graphics borrowing from the visual language of corporate design. In this example, Lum juxtaposes a portrait of artist and curator Zainub Verjee with the logo of Canada Trust bank. Nairobi-born, Vancouver-based Verjee has since become well known for her work in arts administration and Canadian cultural policy; at the time, she was an emerging video artist and a friend of Lum, the two having studied together at Simon Fraser University. The Canada Trust logo is a blocky red-orange ‘C’ turned on its side to enclose a white ‘T’, combining the initials of the bank in a single compact form.
Lum’s appropriation of the familiar corporate symbol inverts its original purpose of visual communication to highlight its ambiguity and political potency. The artist juxtaposes a graphic symbol of a corporation with a photographic portrait of a person, asking the viewer to consider two different representational strategies.
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