Mr. Lum (born 1956) is a Canadian conceptual artist of Chinese heritage who lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. His work is primarily concerned with issues of identity as related to language and portraiture.

He is currently working on a permanent public art commission due to open in 2010 for the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands, in a troubled, but dynamic, multi-ethnic district undergoing redevelopment. A book of his writings from Walther Koenig Books (Cologne) is forthcoming. In 2008, he completed a book project, titled Ultimo Bagaglio (Three Star Press, Paris) with French philosopher Hubert Damisch.

Lum's family established roots in Canada in 1908 through his grandfather Lum Nin – a labourer for the Canadian Pacific Railway company. He grew up in the Strathcona neighborhood and later Vancouver Kingsway in East Vancouver. He is often cited as a member of the informally designated Vancouver School of artists, along with Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, and Roy Arden (he had earlier received instruction from Wall and Wallace as an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University).

Lum represented Canada at the Sydney Biennale in 1995, the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1997, the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, and at Documenta XI in 2002. More recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial 2006, Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing), Istanbul Biennial 2007 and the 2008 Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea).

Lum has worked on several public art projects. "Pi," sponsored by the city of Vienna, Austria, and Wiener Linien (Vienna Public Transit), opened in downtown Vienna in January 2007. The work is over 130 meters long and situated in a prominent pedestrian passageway by Vienna's Karlsplatz subway interchange. In 2000, also in Vienna, he realized a work that responded to the growth of the extreme right in Europe called "There is no place like home," which was installed on the side of the centrally located Vienna Kunsthalle.

He also has publicly commissioned works outside St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Vancouver's Public Works Yard. "Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White" was installed upon the roof of the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2001. The work, which can be viewed as a comment on immigration and acculturation, features four model boats: a First Nations longboat, a cargo ship, the steam liner Komagata Maru, and George Vancouver's ship HMS Discovery. Each vessel has been placed at one of the building's compass points – north, south, east, and west – and painted in a colour intended to reflect the stereotyped racial vision presented in the hymn "Jesus Loves the Little Children."

He was Director of the non-profit OR Gallery in Vancouver from 1983 to 1984, during which time he curated "PoCo Rococo," a exhibition held in Coquitlam Mall, which included high school art students and established artists in Port Coquitlam. He was Project Manager for "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 to 1994," a 2001 exhibition conceived and curated by Okwui Enwezor. He was curator of the 2004 NorthWest Annual for the Center of Contemporary Art in Seattle. In 2005, he co-curated "Shanghai Modern 1919-1945," an exhibition about the city's art and culture during the republican era. The same year, he also co-curated the 7th Sharjah Biennial in The Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates – the largest international contemporary artbiennial in the Middle East.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. Other awards include: a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2007), the Distinguished University Professor Award and the Dorothy Somerset Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative and Performing Art (2003), and the Killam Award for Outstanding Research (UBC, 1998).

Lum was Head of the Graduate Program in studio art from 2000-2006 at the University of British Columbia. He joined the faculty of Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He stood as invited Professor for two years at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and taught as a guest at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich, the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, China, and the l'Ecole d'Arts Plastique in Fort de France, Martinique.

He co-founded Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art with Zheng Shengtian in 2000 and was Editor-in-Chief until 2004. In August 2006, he was keynote speaker opening the 3rd and final symposium of the 15th Biennale of Sydney. From 1999-2001, he wrote an online journal for LondonArt, and he has written several catalog essays, including one on the relationship of art to ethnology for the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, The Netherlands; on the art of Chen Zhen for the Vienna Kunsthalle, a historical analysis of Canadian Cultural Policy; and another concerning issues of multiple identities in respect to Théodore Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa" – a paper which was presented to the Department of Caribbean Studies at Yale University.

He was a board member of the Annie Wong Art Foundation of Hong Kong from 1998-2002. In 2003, he was a juror for the Prix de Rome Prize in the category of Art in Public Space for the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam. He also wrote the essay for the publication accompanying the prize. In 2008, Lum was a juror for the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards conducted in Beijing and sponsored by Swiss Uli Zigg. Lum also served as juror for the 2008 Bloomberg Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London, UK.