Terence Koh - 29 Seconds of Attraction (2004) Inkjet photo on cotton paper, custom pink frame, each circle is hand painted with chocolate, 29 parts, each 8 x 10 in. Courtesy Peres Projects Los Angeles Berlin.
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| Ai Weiwei: The Freedom of Irreverence |
China's opening to the West in the 1990s was fueled by the government's desire for economic expansion and the establishment of a commodity-based culture. That nascent market era has stimulated the growth of contemporary art in China, with artists—no longer fringe renegades and now something akin to entrepreneurs—displaying increasing sophistication and professionalization in how they manage their careers.
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Reading Terence Koh
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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."
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The Cook, The Curator, The Bike & The Festivals: Venice, Kassel, Münster
Perhaps super-curator Harald Szeemann (1993-2005) earnestly wanted to warn would-be participants away from the Venice Biennale when he said, in a 1999 Artforum interview with Robert Storr (See P. 84), "All these nations, or ethnic groups, are looking for a platform to try and bolster their cultural identity or national conscience or whatever it is. This is very touching and frightening, and in the end it may be more interesting psychologically than artistically. There is a problem of First and Third World, between the countries that have national pavilions in the Giardini and the ones that don't."
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