Terence Koh, Diamond Music, 2014
If you search for Terence Koh in the world wide web, the algorythmns throw in art-names like Dan Colen, Dash Snow, Klaus Biesenbach, Ryan McGinley, Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovic. As different as they are, they all played their unique part in the hybris of what is now postum called the hedonistic New York Downtown-art-scene of the early 2000s. And in the middle of it all, there was a young boy, ready to get excited: Terence Koh. Koh, who was born in 1977 in Beijing, and grew up in Canada, where he studied at the Emily Carr Institue of Art and Design Vancouver, made his first steps into the art world with zine publications, prints, photographs and performances under his back then alias Asianpunkyboy. An aggressive, flamboyant and spiritual youngster, wearing all white, sometimes a fur, sometimes pajamalike clothes. His punky approach led him straight to sex, drugs and metal music, or New Gothic Art as the press back then labeled it and him.
His work bases on a combination of very diverse materials and very existential topics. From glas, porcelan, plastic and lights to blood and piss, from animal figures, puppets and living birds to sugar, vegetables and powder, the rang of materials is wide and drastic. His best known work so far may be his gold-plated shit – coming directly out of the cosmos of Italian artists like Pier Laolo Pasolini and Piero Manzoni – which he sold and send out around the world, and his 24-foot-long urinal, which he contributed to a 2009 group show at the New York based gallery of Mary Boone, an open homage to Marcel Duchamp. But as significant this works might be, only behind the obvious drastic you will find the real Koh in his performances and more subtile works. It´s then when he reduces things to a bare and starts to rite relentless in his own space, Koh is opening his temple of love, a huge celebration of gay pornography with its young male bodies in their full celebration and without any moralistic, idelogy and other restrictioins. Its all about the freedom of existence.
Terence Kohs art as much as his life in the early 2000 was all about the celebration of hedonism. But this Lust-driven journey leaded him fast to the duality of things. As we all know, there is no life without death, there is no youth without decay, no beauty without deformedness, no freedom without control, no sexuality without repression and definitly no society without indviuduality. So the bad-boy-behaviour faded out lately.
The new incarnation of Terence Koh is searching for inspiration in the more healthy set-up of nature and privacy. And the results we hear and see with this Edition tie on perfectly with his earlier works, but definitly bring in a new tonality, a happier one, a more optimistic one, a hopeful one.
This edition contains two vinyl 7″Singles with music by Terence Koh and Jack Donoghue.
Each acryl box is hand-engraved in a unique way and signed and numbered by Terence Koh.
Edition of 16 copies (+ 3 AP)
Price: €1,880 (free shipping)
This limited edition by Terence Koh is available at Edition Fieber
