“This is only maybe 10 years ago—I rented furniture, and I put them together… You know, I c[ould] only afford, like, renting the cheapest furniture, and so on. And, then, I gave a talk, and there’s a major European museum curator in the audience, and I said, “well, you know, I bought this because I thought this is good furniture and nice looking.” And he said, “Oh come on that’s just, how could you say that? It’s obviously the worst taste.” And so on. And I said, “No, truly, I thought it was good,” at the time, and everyone just laughed, and didn’t believe me. And I remember thinking at that time—I had another epiphany—thinking, yeah, that’s like taste and that’s about class and that’s about, like, why was it so far-fetched for me to exercise something else approximate to my real economy, and say, this is the taste that was important to me. I think what I try to do is something authentic about the state of being for a lot of people in terms of the accoutrements that they live with.”
Art & Influence
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Ken Lum, Trough, 1986
Four 3-seater modular couch units, Collection of NGC