A Scholars Rock Cut In Half To Reveal A Map Of Lake Ontario - Part 1
Transcript
Hi, my name is Ken Lum and I'm the artist behind the work called, "A Scholars Rock Cut In Half To Reveal A Map Of Lake Ontario". The idea for the work was inspired by the location of the Toronto greater area being sited on Lake Ontario. And so I started thinking about how can I represent the lake. And I started thinking about Scholars Rocks. Scholars Rocks in China are very, very important. And they are essentially very irregularly shaped rocks that were supposed to represent the universe in Chinese philosophy due to its undulating irregular surfaces. And I started riffing off this idea that what if you have a Scholars Rock and it was split in half and it just so happened that when you split it in half you had the outline of Lake Ontario. And so, it's a bit of a fantastical narrative. But that was the idea.
Scholars Rocks, I was interested in Scholars Rocks in part because I'm ethnically Chinese myself. And Scholars Rocks were often sited in gardens and courtyards. And the idea was really meditative. You stand in front of it, you start thinking, it's a reminder of how the universe is endlessly fascinating, endlessly unpredictable, endlessly unanticipatable. If that’s a word? And endlessly full of surprise. And so I liked this idea that within the shape of Lake Ontario you had a kind of infinitude of possibilities, of interesting things. Which I think could be applied to the Toronto area. It's such a great city and so diverse in terms of its demographic makeup and it's histories and stories. So that was the basis for using the Scholars Rocks in conjunction with the shape of Lake Ontario.