Canada—Artist Ken Lum and gallery director and curator Louise Dery won Canada's annual Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards on Monday, the CBC reports. Lum won $25,000 for outstanding achievement as a contemporary artist and Dery $15,000 for curatorial excellence in contemporary art.

Lum, 51, from Vancouver, is a painter, sculptor, photographer, conceptual artist who, in an endeavor to open the field of contemporary art to non-European artists, co-founded Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art in 2000 and has done curatorial work in Africa, China, and the United Arab Emirates. The jury commended the use of familiar commercial designs in his works.

Currently director of the art gallery at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Dery, from Montreal, has also worked at the Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He curated the popular David Altmejd exhibition in the Canadian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale.