‘Bad boy' Koh adds star power to Luminato art festival lineup

mississauga.com, caledonenterprise.com
April 8, 2014
By Murray Whyte

Terence Koh, the Mississauga-raised artist whose alter-ego "Asian punk boy" brought him widespread notoriety with an often-outrageous cross-pollination of gay, punk and pornographic cultures, will be the marquee attraction of Luminato's visual arts program this year. Luminato Festival begins June 6.

Details of Koh's project will be announced this morning (April 8) as the festival rolls out its schedule for the media at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg.

But Koh, 36, is nonetheless a daring choice for a festival still sloughing off its reputation for pedestrian, middle-of-the-road populist programming.

Koh, who was born in Beijing but grew up here, has become something of an infamous sensation in New York in the past decade. In 2004, Koh, who once described himself as the "Naomi Campbell of the art world, " presumably for his bad behaviour, presented a series of paintings featuring drips of his own semen. In 2007, at Art Basel, Koh offered for sale a series of gold-plated dollops that he claimed to be his own feces. Each sold for $500,000, securing for him a certain kind of fame beyond the art world.

This, among other things, made him the notorious bad boy of the New York art scene. Outrageous performances featuring elaborate costuming, or lack thereof, and staging straddled a line between out-there performance art and camp nightclub spectacle.

Koh has also collaborated with notable fashion designers, bringing his extreme esthetic to such haute-couture labels as Louis Vuitton.

In 2008, Koh launched The Terence Koh Show, a talk show of sorts, on YouTube. There, he would entice art world celebrities into joining him, like Marina Abramovic and curator Hans-Ulrich Obst.

He also invited Lady Gaga on for a segment called "88 Pearls, " in which the pair counted pearls together, with the singer decked out in a costume drawn from Koh's work Boy by the Sea. The relationship proved fruitful, as Gaga's performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards used a piano Koh designed for her.

Nonetheless, Koh's reputation for shock value is matched by his firm art world credibility. While he exults in excess, he can also be jarringly minimal. In 2007, he had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art that featured little more than a shimmering, near-blinding light in the museum's lobby gallery. His work is regularly featured in museums throughout North America and Europe.

His immersive environments, often stark white and paired with a performance by the artist himself, can be unnervingly transporting. A 2011 work at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York saw Koh, on his knees and dressed in loose-fitting white clothing, circling an enormous pile of salt eight hours a day for more than a month.

New York Times critic Roberta Smith described the work as "a bare and relentless rite, " expressing concern for Koh's well-being. "I already wish Mr. Koh - whose movement seems increasingly tentative and whose prostrations are becoming more frequent - would stop while he still has knee joints."