How Years of Seclusion on a Mountaintop Trained Artist Terence Koh to Thrive in a World of Virtual Exhibitions and Lockdown Living

The party ended for New York’s art scene in March, when the
city’s galleries, museums, and fairs—along with pretty much
everything else—shut down. For Terence Koh, the artist formerly
known as Asian Punk Boy and “the Naomi Campbell of the
art world,” the party ended a few years earlier, when, in 2014,
he “retired” from art and moved to a mountaintop in the Catskills.
Koh gave up his cell phone, his performances with Lady
Gaga, and his days getting “drunk and drugged” in Miami—and now
he has some words of wisdom for former colleagues who may be
struggling with isolation and lost opportunities.

“Living in the Catskills prepared me more than most people
because I’m able to say, ‘OK, this is the situation and this is
what life has brought you now,’” the artist tells Artnet News.
“Life is always changing and always unpredictable.”

Even though the lockdown era has disrupted our daily routines,
familiar traps will reappear, he says. “Being stuck at home
you have just as many channels of escape as going out. The
medium of escape is the same whether we go to a bar and flirt
with somebody or go to the Whitney,” Koh says. “At home, when
you’re about to check Instagram, try to slow down time itself
and ask, Why do you want to check Instagram? Is it because
you see future images of a heart, the image of love itself? An
endorphin hit?”

Koh has periodically resurfaced in the years since his
“retirement,” though in more restrained form. He reconstructed a
“bee chapel,” as well as sculptures derived from its wax, at Andrew
Edlin Gallery in New York in 2016; two years later, he poured dirt
on the floor of Brussels’s Office Baroque gallery and lit a fire
pit on top. He was set to open another show at Edlin’s gallery last
month, but it was translated into a virtual
exhibition instead (through June 24).

“I went through despair at first when my physical show was
cancelled,” Koh says. But in adapting to the online version, he
discovered new modes of expression that felt just as vital as the
drawing show he had originally planned. While those drawings are on
view in the digital show, so are pages from Koh’s daily
quarantine diary, recipes from his artist friends—including
Marina Abramovic’s “recipe”
for water—and an online store for bartering
goods such as cassette tapes and a cannabis plant.

Ultimately, he decided, the virtual exhibition is just as good
as the live one would have been. “Do we even need art galleries
anymore?” Koh wonders. “Everything I want to do as an artist I’m
able to do across all mediums, whether on Instagram or an online
exhibition or a sculpture or a performance on Zoom or in a museum.
I believe that the fundamental point of an artist, which is also
the fundamental point of every human, is to open up all the
possibilities for existence.”

And now Koh himself is experimenting with another possible
existence—in Los Angeles, where the artist moved two years ago with
his boyfriend, who had started to feel a little too alone
in the Catskills. They’ve brought with them many of the habits they
took up in the mountains—beekeeping, composting, gardening, and
making pigments out of marigolds and daffodils.

“A human being, I’ve discovered, is not meant to be alone so
much, just like the honey bees who touch each other 3,000 times a
day—their legs and antennas rubbing in all this nonverbal
communication. It’s interesting what happens to a human without
these senses,” Koh says.

“We all need this alone time, but what the Catskills taught me
is that we’re capable of taking a breath anytime, anywhere, even in
a dance club at 2 a.m. drunk—at any time, any human is able to take
a breath and go back to this timeless moment,” Koh says. “It’s this
return to a timeless moment that is the highest purpose of us as
humans.” Which may come as good news for those who feel time moving
very, very slowly these days indeed.

The post How Years of Seclusion on a Mountaintop Trained
Artist Terence Koh to Thrive in a World of Virtual Exhibitions and
Lockdown Living appeared first on artnet News.