Ken Lum

The works of Ken Lum’s Portrait-Repeated Text series explore the familiar experience of streetscapes, offering a bystander’s insight into the inner monologues, chanted reassurances, or emotional eruptions of anonymous passers-by. Onions, eggs, milk, butter, newspaper is a fantastic example. A small boy, presumably given strict instructions not to forget, repeats a shopping list on the way to the store. The bold blue text on a yellow field bears the graphic intensity and repetition of advertising copy, while the image has the documentary generality of a stock photograph, but the scene is immediately recognizable. The boy looks down so as not to be distracted, but distractions abound: discarded packaging, wildflowers, maybe a passing car all threaten to interrupt his focus. Moreover, the list threatens to fall apart altogether, as each mumbled repetition runs the risk of the words losing their semantic meaning. Presented with voyeuristic distance, the work exists at the tension between intimacy and detachment. Lum puts us in a questioning position - do we wait in idle expectation for the boy to make an inevitable mistake? Or do we offer him a pen and paper?