Melly Shum Forever
“Every city needs a monument to the problem of hating one’s job.”
Last week, someone I follow on Instagram posted a snapshot of the Canadian artist Ken Lum’s photo-text work Melly Shum Hates Her Job, which has been installed, billboard-style, on the facade of Rotterdam’s Witte de With museum since 1990.
How had I never seen this before? It’s a perfect image, sly and funny and true, and enigmatic in a way that keeps you looking. Is that a smile of weary resignation on Melly Shum’s face—or barely concealed rage?
How did this avatar of workday malaise end up on a Rotterdam street corner for 34 years and counting? Originally created in 1989 in Vancouver, where Lum was born and where he worked for much of his career (he’s now based in Philadelphia), the piece was repurposed as a billboard to promote an exhibition of Lum’s work at the opening of the Witte de With, in 1990. When the billboard was eventually removed—well, here’s Lum explaining what happened, in a 2012 essay:
After the work was taken down due to its weathered state, something extraordinary happened: the Witte de With staff received several telephone calls and a number of written messages protesting the disappearance of Melly Shum and demanding her reinstatement. Asked why it was important for Melly Shum to return to the corner at Witte de Withstraat and Boomgaardstraat, one caller reasoned that every city needs a monument to the problem of hating one’s job.
Ha, yes! The image has proved so powerful, in fact, that when the Witte de With recently decided to rename itself—to remove its association with a violent Dutch colonialist—there was really only one choice. It has been the Kunstinstituut Melly since 2020.
Melly Shum Hates Her Job is, not surprisingly, rooted in Lum’s personal history. Growing up on the edge of poverty in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighborhood, Lum was always interested in art. But a high school art teacher chided him for the “weird” images he produced in class, and barred Lum from taking any further art electives at school. Lum turned his attention to math and science classes instead. He continued on this track as a university student, though he got little satisfaction from his studies and always had to exert himself to keep up.
One summer—as Lum recounts in the preface to his 2020 book Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018—Lum got a job as a lab assistant in a research station of the British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture. There, his work was noticed by his boss, the lab’s director, who took him aside and told Lum that if he continued working hard, and continued studying toward a PhD, in ten years he could be running the lab himself. Lum’s reaction:
Rather than feel reassured by Dr. Costello’s message of encouragement, I felt an immediate sense of confusion and fear about what I really wanted to do. I was deeply afraid of the idea of spending my life working in a laboratory. I found life there isolating. I felt something missing in the rest of my life as well. I wanted to experience more of the world. It was clear to me that a drastic change of course was needed.
How many of us have had this experience, of being offered a work opportunity and suddenly realizing—oh shit, this is not what I want to do with my life? Lum was resourceful enough to find his way to an art career. I like to think that Melly Shum is his alter-ego, a version of who he might have become if he hadn’t changed course and had instead tried to make an uneasy peace with his day job.
If this feels like an overly biographical interpretation, I suspect Lum would be OK with it. He said in a recent interview:
I think art is always about the theorization of biography. How I was constituted and my perspective are all I can bring to the art world. I’m not talking about relativizing a personal opinion. I’m talking about what an artist can bring to a dialogue that’s already complex and formed and continuing to unfold, and how, through art and writing, you insert yourself into that dialogue. So, yes, I think art is a theory of the self and that’s why I make it.
Art is a theory of the self! I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it in those terms—but isn’t that exactly right? Reading this unlocked something for me . . . though now I’m having a hard time articulating what it was. Maybe next time.
MELLY!
Writing the above, I assumed that “Melly Shum” is a fictional person, an invention of the artist Ken Lum. Nope! The real Melly Shum was a student of Lum’s in 1989, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa. She sat for a portrait by him in the school’s photography lab—and had no idea what happened with the portrait until she Googled herself years later and discovered that she’s an international art-world icon.
In 2021, the journalist Sean O’Neill reunited Shum and Lum over video chat; the resulting interview is very much worth reading. Spoiler: After university, Shum couldn’t find a job in the art world so she went into retail instead. As of 2021, she was a sales representative for an appliance store in Markham, Ontario—and, she insists, she loves her job!
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"How many of us have had this experience, of being offered a work opportunity and suddenly realizing—oh shit, this is not what I want to do with my life?"
Yup. That's my story. More than once. Thanks for this one Mason! A great and encouraging read.
Oh my goodness, this is perfect.