Having an unhappy Monday? Surely it’s not as bad as Melly Shum’s. But can Melly Shum really be the smiling woman in the picture, bearing the bad coffee and the many other trials of office life through gritted teeth, or do we just assume that’s her? When artist Ken Lum created the work back in 1989, there was much discussion around our ingrained reactions to traditional advertising techniques and our immediate correlation of word and image simply because they’re side-by-side. The piece was installed on the side of the Witte de With in Rotterdam as part of its inaugural exhibition in 1990. When it was removed at the end of the show, a number of residents called in to protest, arguing, as Lum recalls, that “every city needs a monument to hating one’s job”. Melly was reinstalled and watches over Rotterdam’s commuters to this day. Not only that, but this Summer, she has appeared in Berlin, at Moritzplatz, on the corner of Prinzessinenstrasse, thanks to Galerie Nagel-Draxler. The installation is a collaboration with Klemm’s, as part of their group exhibition Form, Class and Beauty, which opened last Friday. Of course, in the twenty years since Melly first made her complaint, the landscape of work has changed—for example, with a growing gig economy. What job might she have now, and most importantly, would she still hate it?
