Friday 19th August 2016
Terence Koh is one of the most famous naughty artists you may never have heard of. Regarded widely as a provocateur and all around bad actor of the art world, he did his very best to earn this reputation. He first made a name for himself during the mid 2000s when the art fair world was really taking off. He went to Art Basel, the grandfather of all the famous art fairs, and gold-plated his own feces.
As if that wasn't enough, he sold said gold-plated objects for roughly half a million dollars US. It sort of boggles the mind.
In 2014, he said in an interview that he was quitting the art world, whereupon he moved to the Catskill Mountains region of New York State where he was quiet for some time. Then, of course, came his return, along with his protestations at this characterization. “I never had any intention of quitting the art world, I just moved to a different part of the world,” he claims, which seems fair enough.
He's back now with two rather important projects, one of which is a performance art recitation and salute to the victims of the horrific shooting in the Orlando gay night club Pulse during June. Koh read the names of each person who was killed or wounded during the massacre, and the recitation was transmitted into outer space via an antenna on the roof of the Andrew Edlin gallery in the Lower East Side neighbourhood of Manhattan.
On a slightly less tragic but equally serious note, Koh's other recent project is an examination of the roles of bees in human civilization, with the installation piece entitled 'Bee Chapel'.
You can see them through the mesh and you can smell them and they’re dropping pollen at you. The hive pretty much vibrates as well,” Koh said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “The idea is I want to be able to resonate with the bees at the same time as the bees are resonating with us.”
Quite a long way to go from gold-plated feces, but a far more interesting direction. Bee Chapel was also on display at the Andrew Edlin gallery, but after an extension to the end of July has now be disassembled. The original piece still lives on in his place in the Catskills, however.
Posted on August 19th 2016 on 05:29pm
