Join artist Ken Lum, Director, Kunstinstituut Melly, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, and Xiaoyu Weng, AGO's Carol and Morton Rapp Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, for a conversation about Lum's work and the Rotterdam museum, Kunstinstituut Melly which is named after Lum's much loved 1989 work Melly Shum Hates Her Job.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Ken Lum: Death and Furniture.

Ken Lum is a Canadian artist living in the Philadelphia area where he is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. Lum has a long and distinguished exhibition record spanning four decades. His work is the subject of numerous solo exhibitions such as Ken Lum.Time. And Again. at Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium and Sculpture International Rotterdam at Kruisplein, the Netherlands (2021); What's old is old for a dog. at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2018); and Ken Lum. Coming Soon, Vienna Kunsthalle Karlsplatz Public Space (2015). Lum has also participated in major group exhibitions such as Lost in America, at Der Neue Berliner Kunstverein (2020); Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s at Hirshhorn Museum, Washing DC (2018); and Photography in Canada: 1960-2000, National Gallery of Art, Ottawa (2017). He has participated in international biennales, such as the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, the Carnegie International, the Moscow Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, the Moscow Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial, among others. His work was also part of Documenta 11. Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on several permanent public art commissions including for Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City. His work can be found in the permanent collection of: Arco Foundation Collection, Madrid, Spain; Jumex Art Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Musée d;Art Contemporain, Montreal; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba and Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art).

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (MX) started her tenure as Director at the Witte de With in January 2018, after being the curator of contemporary art at Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in Caracas and New York from 2011 to 2017. In 2016-2017, she was also guest curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. In 2013, Sofía was artistic director and chief curator of the 9a Bienal do Mercosul | Porto Alegre in Brazil, and before that, she was an agent of dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel. In the past, Sofía has been director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and held curatorial positions in New York at Art in General and Americas Society. She is also a counselor for Fundación Alumnos47 in Mexico City, and is a board member of Creative Time in New York.

Prior to joining the AGO in 2021, Xiaoyu Weng held positions as The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Director of Asia Programs at the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, and in 2018-19, she served as the Curator of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Her curatorial practice focuses on the impact of identity, globalization and decolonization, as well as the intersection of art, science and technology. As head of the modern and contemporary department, Xiaoyu leads the team and collaborates closely with local and international art communities to present rich and complex art and programming, and envisions new ways to grow the AGO Collection, its profile and impact. She holds a Master’s Degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a Bachelor’s Degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.