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Photography by Rick Mansfield of Anchor Imagery
Canadian artist Terence Koh is known for his provocative sculptures, installations, and performances that combine themes of desire, fantasy, youthfulness, and decay. His works are not specifically autobiographical, but express the artist’s identity and sexuality through a personal mythology and aesthetic sensibility that oscillates between baroque opulence and minimalist asceticism. In past installations he has filled hundreds of vitrines with objects—food, kitschy toys, expensive china and jewels, tourist trinkets, movie paraphernalia, classical sculpture, and rubbish—covered by white or black paint, or gilded with gold leaf. Displayed in stark white-on-white galleries, the sealed vitrines become hermetic environments for contemplation or even mourning as these silenced objects of ritual, play, and aesthetic devotion seem to have reached some form of transcendent afterlife. In other exhibitions Koh has enacted ritualistic performances. For a five-week solo show in 2011 at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, he slowly circled a cone-shaped pile of white salt—8 feet high and 24 feet across—on his knees, continuously for the duration of the exhibition. Koh’s performances and installations have been linked to the durational performances of Marina Abramovic as well as the antics of Dadaist provocateurs of the early twentieth century.
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