Reading Terence Koh
Profile/New York
by Paul Laster

Viewers of new art with little background knowledge about an artist are often baffled by what they see. This was particularly true at Terence Koh's recent solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The museum's advance press release stated, "Using light as his material…Koh plans to transform the gallery space into a seductive, yet inaccessible diorama, creating a psychological interaction with the viewer that evokes desire and loss, pain and hope." That statement hardly prepared visitors for the installation: a 4000-watt movie daylight floodlight, pointed directly at the audience. One critic wrote: "I came. I saw. I was blinded."

The attending cognoscenti, on the other hand, basked in the bright light and posed for cameras, unaware that there was more to be seen. Inside the stark white room, visible only to those willing to endure the pain of the intense light, was a secret object: a basketball-size lead ball, wickedly rumored to hold a sample of the artist's excrement. Dazzled by a show that appeared to present nothing but the spot-lit glow of a Hollywood premiere, the crowd then headed to the downtown gallery Deitch Projects for Koh's performance, The End of My Life as a Rabbit in Love. There, the fashionable pack, dressed in white as instructed, was greeted by a white fog-filled room where a white-wigged pianist played rock tunes on a white baby grand piano as 12 young male muses parade around in sheer white shrouds and white cotton briefs. After much anticipation, Koh appeared on a round stage below two large pulsing neon stars, wearing a white wig, a white fur jacket and white pants covered in mirror shards. Grasping a microphone, the artist belted out a shrieking rap in a language of his own making. Enigmatic and powerful, the two-part event tapped into the experimental vein of the avant-garde.

Terence Koh's rise has been meteoric (see AAP 39). Four years after his first solo show as Peres Projects in Los Angeles and three years after his inclusion as a relative unknown at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Koh has presented his characteristic brand of anti-market conceptual art in his first US museum show. Hard to nail down, Koh was born in Beijing in 1977 or Singapore in 1969; his Chinese family either immigrated to Toronto when he was 12 or he was adopted by a Canadian family in Montreal. Koh constructs false histories and fictional characters that act as his surrogates. Recently asked about his birthplace, he replied, "I am from everywhere." After receiving a degree in architecture from the University of Waterloo, he attended graduate school in Vancouver, worked with architect Zaha Hadid in London and was an assistant to AA Bronson, an artist and now director of the New York non-profit artist book and multiples organization Printed Matter.

Beginning his own artistic career as a maker of simple artist books and gaining attention for his provocative website asianpunkboy, Koh quickly adapted the life and death issues and baroque and minimalist strategies of his first major work—a 2002 mirrored coffin containing personal and found artifacts in small boxes—to the transformation of large spaces. Influenced by the poetic and the profane, he is guided by a sense of shamanistic ritualism. Thanks to the dynamism of his dealer, Javier Peres, who took his roster of artists—including assume vivid astro focus, Dan Attoe and Dean Sameshima—to the world stage by opening a second gallery in Berlin in 2005, Koh is currently one of the darlings of the high-rolling art world.

Controversy and circumstance have fueled Koh's rapid rise and a flow of clever ideas has sustained an adulatory response. As his mentor Bronson pointed out in the catalog an adulatory response. As his mentor Bronson pointed out in the catalog for Koh's 2005 museum show at the Vienna Secession: "Terence does nothing halfway." For that exhibition, Koh created a desolate white room where he could conceivably spend the rest of his life in reclusion. Contrasting with this harsh inner realm, the entranceway was filled with stacked handcrafted vitrines containing white symbolic objects such as action figures, ceramic animals and the plaster-cast head of a friend, recalling the artist's past and present. In the Statement section of the Art Basel art fair in 2006, Kohn took a nastier path to transformation by offering up his gilded turds in golden vitrines. Surprisingly, eager collectors quickly snapped up portions of the installation for a reported sum of a half-million US dollars.

Fast Forward to a solo show at the Kunsthalle Zurich in fall 2006, where Koh created 1200 stacked vitrines filled with white objects, often broken and repaired: dead spiders and fetish objects such as antlers and skulls. He covered the floor of one gallery in shimmering, snowy drifts of potato starch and made two monolithic forms that resembled armless, decapitated torsos from 700 kilos of white chocolate and more than a ton of sugar. Kohn engaged the two candy mountains in a ritualistic performance: wearing nothing but a long white wig, he licked the surface and lathered his body with its substance. In anticipation of his Whitney installation, he turned up the lighting to make the galleried brighter than ever. A critic for Art Review magazine labeled it "conceptual bling."

Six weeks later, Kohn was in the news again when collector and promoter Charles Saatchi pulled two of the artist's pieces from the "USA Today" show at the Royal Academy in London—fearing a backlash for exhibiting Untitled (Medusa), a 2004 work consisting of a white portable closet with a black interior containing a urinal, inverted crucifixes and "peeing" Madonnas, and the sculpture These Decades that We Never Sleep, Black Drums (2004), a black drum kit covered in ropes and spattered with the artist's blood and semen. Saatchi officially stated that they were withdrawn due to space concerns. Defending the work, however, Saatchi told the Independent newspaper, "Terence Koh's work is as nasty as you like. He has the face of an angel but the soul of a sewer rat. He and Banks Violette are the two most exciting new sculptors in America."

When discussing his work for a 2004 article for ArtAsiaPacific, the then-emerging artist asked, "How do artists make money?' Koh's question is especially ironic in light of how quickly things have changed for him. Perhaps Peres has a Midas touch; Saatchi reportedly paid USD 500,000 for a single sculpture by Dan Colen, another young artist in the dealer's stable. Or maybe Koh's achievements have been mystically guided by the eight influential deceased artists—Andy Warhol, James Lee Byars, Ray Johnson, Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, George Maciunas, John Cage and Daivd Wojnarowicz—that he spiritually coaxed to a dinner in early 2006 via a séance, which he later posted on this current website, KOHBUNNY.

More likely, Koh's success is the result of staying true to an asianpunkboy attitude. Kohn is a enfant terrible—speaking his own language, constructing secret objects and personas, toying with sexually suggestive subject matter and rejecting convention. Whitney Museum associate curator Shamim Momin, an ardent supporter and the organizer of his Whitney exhibition, captures his essence in her catalog essay: "In the push to ritual that characterizes much recent art, Kohn is the consummate sorcerer of the moment. Awash with desire, transformation, death and loneliness, his work embodies one of the oldest and most necessary of human impulses, the art of the conjurer. The ultimate goal of the conjurer's magic is to make things happen and to revise and create new meaning in the world according to the magician's desire, yet always with the risk that some result will go terribly awry."