Harry Lum was born in 1930 in Walnut Creek, California, the fourth son of Chinese immigrant parents. Harry’s family moved to San Francisco in 1933 and he spent his youth in the city’s vibrant Chinatown. Harry graduated from Lowell High School and enrolled at University of California at Berkeley. Encountering films about the Holocaust in one of his classes, he eventually gave up chemistry to study art, receiving his BA in 1953 and an MA in 1954. Influenced by an older generation of the Bay Area Figurative painters, like Paul Wonner and Richard Diebenkorn, Harry saw figuration as a way to explore what it meant to be human.
After a stint in the Army, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris from 1959 to 1960. Studying the drawings of the great French artist, Jean-Baptist Camille Corot, led Harry to experiment with abstraction and upon his return, while he took up teaching at U.C. Berkeley and the Richmond Art Center from 1961-1972. In 1972, he moved to San Diego where he was offered a full-time position at Grossmont College in El Cajon. Harry taught at Grossmont until 1995 when he retired and moved to the small Northern California town of Nevada City.
Harry strongly identified as an artist and educator, putting the bulk of his energy into those two activities. Still, over his six-decade painting career, Harry exhibited regularly on the West Coast, mounting solo exhibitions at Mill College Art Museum, Oakland, San Jose Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Richmond Art Center, Grossmont College, El Cajon, and at the Berkeley Gallery and Dana Reich Gallery, in San Francisco. He was also included in many group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Mills College Art Museum, Richmond Art Center, Palace of Legion of Honor and De Young Museums, San Francisco, San Diego Museum of Art, and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.
Harry passed away in 2022, just shy of his 92nd birthday.