Finding the Words

You don't Love Me 1994 was inspired by a real-life event I witnessed in downtown Vancouver while sitting on a bus and looking out the window. As the bus paused to pick up passengers, I saw a young woman crying angrily on the street. She was yelling at her boyfriend: ‘You don’t love me!’ To show disdain for her words, he was backing away slowly with a sneer on his face. I immediately felt empathy for the woman, because the man’s expression seemed cruelly indifferent, meant only to intensify her pain.

At first, I thought: she should leave that jerk – in fact, he was doing her a favour by leaving. But relationships don’t usually work that way, and I didn’t know the details of their situation. What I did know was that this volatile scene playing out in public was sad, and, like many other people on the bus, I was caught up in it. The distressed young woman repeated the phrase with slight variations: ‘You do not love me! You have never loved me! You have never cared about me!’ She was almost speechless, stuck in a loop. In these moments, when everything we believe about something close to ourselves breaks down, we can enter a reality beyond what language can express.

I’ve always been fascinated by the limits of language. Though I was born in Canada, I grew up in a family who spoke little to no English and lived in a neighbourhood where Cantonese was the primary language. I skipped kindergarten and went straight to grade school in 1963, at the age of six, knowing hardly any English. Anyone who knows multiple languages understands how challenging it can be to convey specific meanings accurately in another tongue. That is partly because no language can capture the fullness of experience. An important work for me in illustrating this idea is American conceptual artist Martha Rosler’s 1974–5 photo-text installation The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, in which she addressed the limitations of photography and text in conveying the poverty and dilapidation that characterised the Bowery neighbourhood in New York at the time.

Back then, many established theories focused on the role of text in questioning the sacredness and appeal of images. The writings of the French literary theorist Roland Barthes were especially influential to me when I started art school in 1978. His essay, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (1964), explored how text functions to anchor the ‘floating chain of signifieds’ within the image. Likewise, several conceptual artists, such as Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language group, used text as their main medium, aiming to move art away from focusing solely on visual perception. These ideas were developed in response to the crisis of representation – the disconnect between reality and what art can portray – and were central to much conceptual art created in the 1960s and 1970s. Another focus was on the politics of anti-aesthetics, which challenged long-standing biases in art creation and interpretation, including gendered and racialised ideas of beauty, transcendence and eternity. While I sympathised with these concerns, I did not fully agree with the idea that text was an anti-aesthetic remedy for imagery. As a former commercial sign painter and graphic designer, I saw graphic text as an under-theorised area – another part of a system of representation, much like images.

You don’t love me is part of a series that continues to this day, rooted in these ideas, which I still find meaningful. In this age of ubiquitous internet, smartphones, and other screen-based cultures, the combined use of image and text has only become more powerful in shaping – and confusing – our sense of identity.

^{You don’t love me was lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the North American Acquisitions Committee and Eleanor and Frances Shen in 2025. It is currently on display at Tate Modern.}

^{Ken Lum is an artist based in Haverford, Pennsylvania.}