Terence Koh: A former bad boy finds his way home
Canadian-raised Terence Koh built a reputation as an artist out to shock. He brings his first show on home turf to the McMichael Collection for Luminato and it’s a quiet, gentle thing.

Thestar.com
June 6, 2014
By Murray Whyte

Terence Koh pads happily around the manicured grounds of the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art, felted slippers on his sockless feet. “I’m just becoming an old man,” he says, laughing a little, which despite his relative youth (he’s somewhere in his mid-30s, though he declines to say exactly) explains a lot.

By reputation, Koh would chafe, to put it mildly, at a walk in the woods. A little more than a decade ago, Koh exploded onto the art scene in New York with a body of work that was less than idyllic: densely artificial environments strewn with flea market and sex shop baubles, painted floor-to-ceiling white; a series of sculptures presented at Art Basel that he purported to be his own feces, plated in gold (collectors clamoured to acquire them at a total selling price of around $500,000); and an overall appetite for shock that approached the comically absurd.

Koh would routinely make works incorporating his own semen, for example, or appear naked and in drag at various performances, trumpeting his sexuality with recklessly naughty abandon (at the Armory Show in New York one year, he held an “opening” that turned out to be a full-blown gay backroom).

So it’s with a little surprise, then, that Koh, comfortably shod and wearing slumpy overalls and a chambray workshirt, finds himself here, among the trees and bird songs of the country’s stuffiest art institution.

Here lie - quite literally - the Group of Seven, or most of them at least, buried on the grounds at the behest of the museum’s founder, Robert McMichael. But Koh has no intention of dancing on their graves. “I see artists as one big family, really,” he says, quietly. “It’s not a competition.”

He’s here for Luminato, to craft a new performance, and one that will offend exactly no one. It’s called tomorrow’s snow and it is a quiet, gentle thing: in each performance, two children emerge onto a platform of artificial snow and quietly make snow angels as the light shifts around them.

“It was just something I remembered from childhood,” explains Koh, who was born in Beijing but grew up in Mississauga. “Being Canadian, you read Margaret Atwood; it was part of the school curriculum. I don’t remember which book, specifically, but it doesn’t matter, really. It was this image, of someone looking down from a window and seeing two kids making snow angels in the moonlight, that stayed.”

However much it stayed, it would seem to have been buried deep. After finishing his degree at the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver, he moved to New York, where he started his career as a provocateur in earnest. An alter-ego, asianpunkboy, appeared online caught in an array of naughty activities, catching the eye of a moneyed collector, Javier Peres, who opened a gallery with Koh, an unknown, as the headliner.

Within a few years, Koh, fuelled by his sensational bad-boy sensibility, was a name to be reckoned with, selling work for hundreds of thousands of dollars and showing in prestigious museums in Europe and the U.S. (Oddly, or not, depending on your view of the Canadian art establishment, the Luminato performance is his first ever show in his homeland. “Maybe people don’t think of me as Canadian,” he muses. “But I think of myself as very Canadian. I think of dying here.”)

His reputation as an artist grew alongside his public persona as a downtown fashionista party monster and gay culture icon, appearing at fashion shows and clubs in outrageous costume. One of his first plans with his new-found fame was to create a gay porn production house in the building he had bought on Canal St. He appeared often in his “monkey fur,” a white fur bolero that mounded up on his shoulders. He once described himself as “the Naomi Campbell of the art world.”

That, Koh says, is behind him.

“Things happened very quickly when I was young,” he says. “And being young and inexperienced, these things happen. But getting older, gaining experience, I couldn’t really go on in the same fashion.”

These days, Koh spends the majority of his time on a rural property a couple of hours outside New York - hence the level of comfort with trees - with his long-time partner. Buddhism comes up frequently (he’s not a full adherent but respects its ideas). He’s quiet, a little nervous, but friendly and grateful to the young staff who work busily on the stage for the performance. “I call them the kids,” he smiles. “They have all this energy. It makes me really happy to see: it’s a cycle of life.”

His work has changed: a 2011 performance piece in New York had Koh, dressed in monklike pyjamas, slowly circling a huge mound of salt, on his knees, for all the hours the gallery was open.

He called it nothingtoodoo, and its minimal, almost spiritual tone was a signal of his shifting priorities. Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times, called the work an “abject penance,” almost as though an atonement for the litany of naughtiness he had built up over the years.

On top of the McMichael project, Koh has made a short video for TTC subway screens (“it’s a video of a single cloud,” he says; “you can make of it what you will”). Still, his reputation precedes him. Hannah Hurtzig, whose Berlin-based Copycat Academy is at the Theatre Centre for Luminato, asked him to get naked for the project.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t be naked for performances ever again,” he laughs. “I did that many, many times. So I’m not sure yet.”

The focus for Koh has undoubtedly been on the McMichael, where he’s been siting himself in that family of artists from which, one could fairly say, he was a happily estranged black sheep. Over the past few weeks, Koh has immersed himself in Emily Carr - her writing, her works, everything he could get his hands on - and discovered a powerful affinity.

“I didn’t know much about her,” he says. “But since the start of this project, I’ve fallen madly in love with her. Before, I always saw painting as this kind of conservative thing but, with Emily, I realized painting could be spiritual. Her work jumps out of time and space.”

Koh was led to Carr by Jorn Weisbrodt, Luminato’s director, who suggested he craft a piece around her. Koh chose to tread carefully. “I wouldn’t want Emily to slap me in the face,” he smiles. “So I really thought, ‘What would mean the most to her?’” Koh looked at Carr’s paintings - forests decimated by logging, in some cases, with a few scraggly tall pines determined to survive - and he had his answer.

“Trees,” he says. “Of course. So I thought it was most appropriate, and humble, to plant a tree for her.”

The eventual site he chose, near the graveyard of the Group of Seven, a bit off to one side, reflects her individuality. “She wouldn’t want to be in the middle anyway,” he says. It’s called a way to the light and the tree will be fitted with a haiku by Koh: “To Emily Carr/Growing straight to God’s light/Seasons forgotten.”

For Koh, it’s a strange but fitting tribute to an artist he admires and the artist he’s become.

“Humbleness,” he says, when asked what he’d like to be known for now. “I was a bit elitist before, I think. Now, I’m less interested in being an artist. I’m just trying to be a human being.”