Vancouver artist Ken Lum, always a leader in the controversial scene of global art, is at the centre of a political controversy in Vienna, Austria.

Lum is one of hundreds of top international artists connected with Vienna's new Museum in Progress, a new and quite flexible institution that presents art projects in print media, on billboards and the facades of buildings ... and on their website. It tries to integrate art into everyday life.

Even more important, the Museum in Progress has taken on the role of countering the message of the emerging right-wing politicians who earlier this year took a leading role in a coalition government. While the controversial Freedom Party leader Jorge Haider has had to step back from a central role in government, his henchmen are quite actively trying to take Austria back to the pre-WW2 era with anti-immigration and anti-EU stances.

Lum is a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship winner who hangs on gallery walls with his Vancouver contemporaries Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace. Born in 1956 in Canada to immigrant parents, he's always drawn on his multicultural experiences in Vancouver, a city he considers to be "the periphery of Western civilization, separated from central and eastern Canada and the United States by the Rocky Mountains."

His commission for the Vienna's Museum in Progress is There's No Place Like Home, a multimedia expression of the immigrant's best dreams and worst fears. Now, Vancouver's artist-run centre, Artspeak, reports that the commission was turned down: "Ken Lum's proposal for a public art billboard commission in Vienna was rejected at a very late stage by two officials with affiliation to the Freedom Party, on the grounds that the idea takes 'public discussion in the wrong direction'."

Another group has taken Lum's rejected proposal and will display it on a single, gigantic billboard in Vienna. Meanwhile, Lum has offered Vancouver's Artspeak an edition of 100 full colour prints, which they are selling in support of its public programs. The posters are $500 Cdn., and you can order online at:

Fine Tuning: Today on CBC's Between the Covers, a new reading begins of Catherine Bush's latest novel, The Rules of Engagement. The story follows the adventures of Arcadia Hearne, a researcher of contemporary war who studies military intervention. Her research leads her to a new understanding of her own life, and the men in it. In Hour One of Richardson's Roundup, which begins at 2:06 (2:36 NT) on CBC Radio One.