A curious sight awaits as you as you stand at the lights to cross Edmonds and Kingsway’s busy intersection: a large bronze workhorse sits upright on its haunches, a yoke around its neck. Behind it, by a garden, sits a bronze log, the chains that once attached it to the workhorse now broken.

Against the glass façade of the new Kings Crossing development, the animal stares out like a holdover from the site’s industrial past.

It is a paradox that becomes clearer when you realize who created it.

The Retired Draught Horse and the Last Pulled Log is the new public artwork from Ken Lum, the talent behind iconic local installations like Monument to East Vancouver and from shangri-la to shangri-la, and the recently announced winner of a 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. And like other public commissions he’s installed in cities from Rotterdam to St. Louis, it plays with ideas of memory, history, and the social identity of its locale—in this case a Burnaby neighbourhood in the midst of a development boom that’s pushed eastward from Vancouver.

“I started looking at Percheron horses because that was the main horse that took down trees in this area and also plowed the fields,” he tells the Straight, interviewed at the site on a sunny February day. “I came across an old picture of this horse that was sitting down and it looked really odd. And I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t know horses sat’—and apparently they don’t. The camera only captures an instant—horses apparently sit just for a moment between lying down or standing up. I thought, ‘What if the horse was permanently sitting?’ which would make it kind of unusual, and I started thinking of kind of this guard dog sitting in this awkward position, performing the role of a kind of sentinel that is regarding the unfolding of the day.”

On a literal level, the sculpture recognizes that Kingsway, a century and a half before it became a transit hub with megamalls, neon-lit sushi joints, and pho restaurants, was a thoroughfare where horses hauled logs from the Fraser River to the harbour at English Bay. Joining Lum at the site, nearby resident and historian Christine Manzer says she instantly got the reference the first time she saw The Retired Draught Horse and the Last Pulled Log. “Workhorses pulled logs, delivered milk, transported kegs of beer or nails,” she notes.

Lum has come to town from his post in Philadelphia, where he is the chair of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He’s launching the sculpture and also his new book of essays, Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991-2018. And in keeping with the title of that book, he reveals the multiple levels of meaning in Burnaby’s prominent new resident, commissioned to sit at the Cressey Development Group site.

While in that traditional bronze, Lum’s new piece honours the working class that pioneered the building of the city. The East Van–raised artist says he drew some inspiration from Bataille, the white workhorse in Emile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal, an animal that laboured in the mines, never saw daylight, and stood in for all the suffering of the miners who riot in the book.
“That’s a very slumped back, so it’s a real horse of labour, a beast of burden, an old horse, still with the yoke around its neck,” he points out.

Like so much of Lum’s work, The Retired Draught Horse and the Last Pulled Log also draws from his own working-class past. Lum’s grandparents were part of the Lower Mainland’s agrarian history in a different way—working the fields in Cloverdale. His mother spent long hours at the Keefer Laundry, and his father was a cook at long-shuttered Vancouver institution The Only Sea Foods.

Lum’s roots go deep in East Vancouver. He was born at Mount St. Joseph, went to Admiral Seymour Secondary School, and remembers coming to the end of Burnaby to bowl at the late, great Middlegate Lanes. Today, the old low-rise buildings across from Kings Crossing’s shiny new residential towers are a colourful mishmash, with a Brazilian-martial-arts studio, Asian restaurants, and an East African grocer; Lum notes he tried a delicious duck broth at a place up the street.

That mix reminds Lum a bit of the neighbourhood he grew up in. He’s an international artist these days, travelling extensively to work on projects around the world, teaching in Paris, and now calling the U.S. home. This commission feels like the closing of a circle, he says.

“Burnaby is interesting to me; I grew up in East Vancouver and this is more East Vancouver than East Vancouver now,” he says, and then adds: “I’m not against development, but I do think the power of the developer has always been too powerful here.”

He’s been enjoying Philly, a blue-collar, Democratic stronghold with historic universities. “And it’s a city full of tradition, like, ‘This is the way we do things,’ ” he says. “I lived in Paris and it was also like that.” It’s a trait Vancouver could use more of, he argues, suggesting we’re too eager to tear our history down to make way for something new.

Its form might be a bit surprising for Vancouverites familiar with Lum’s more conceptual local works—such as the glowing defiance of the East Van Cross symbol, or Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White, with its painted vessels (representations of the Komagata Maru, a Chinese cargo ship, an Indigenous canoe, and Capt. Vancouver’s boat) teetering on the Vancouver Art Gallery roof. But he’s created more representational-looking bronze public artworks elsewhere, including The River Between Us: Homer Plessy and Dred Scott, which consists of busts of two civil-rights martyrs in St. Louis and New Orleans.

“There’s a kind of view, particularly among contemporary artists, that depictive or representational art using traditional materials was part of the crisis of representation that needed to be torn down,” Lum says. “But I think everything about representation can be torn down, whether it’s abstract or modern or whatever. And I also think it’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It depends how you conceptualize or allegorize it.”

As ever, with The Retired Draught Horse and the Last Pulled Log, Lum is playing with the notion of the monument—who we memorialize, and which narratives we remember.

“This area is in the throes of development and that can be quite disorienting,” he says. “So the question was how to make a work that recognizes that, but also destabilizes it to a degree.”
And so his draft horse will never lie to rest, or stand to work again, but instead sit in perpetual limbo to watch Burnaby change around it.