Born 1980, Beijing, China.
Lives and works New York. Berlin and Taiwan
Terence Koh was born in China and adopted at an early age by a middle class French Canadian family and raised in the suburbs of Vancouver. He has likened himself to Peter Pan and for a while assumed the alter-ego Asianpunkboy (AOB) under which he launched the websites asianpunkboy.com and asianbunny.com and published a series of books about the things that concern him most in his art like the stereotyping of racial, sexual, cultural and sub-cultural identity. Much of the material contained in his books and on the websites is sexually explicit and confronts some of straight society’s more deeply felt taboos. In the process of taboo breaking, Terence Koh makes beautiful and romantic installations and sculptures that also contain an almost classical aesthetic and become vehicles for the manifestation of some of the more extreme expressions of contemporary society. Terence Koh’s themes are the grand dualities of humanity, life and death, youthfulness and decay, beauty and illness, cultural identity and individual personality, sexuality, civilisation and Dionysian excess. He creates atmospheric spaces with his installations and objects in which recollection and fantasy are mixed with art history and sub-cultural extremes and where some of the more superficial aspects of contemporary culture are united with fetish cultures and a use of ritual. He employs a wide range of material much of which is ephemeral by nature; shit, dehydrated vegetable matter, bees wax, paraffin and lipstick. Mein Todd Mein Todd is made from a range of materials that include vegetable matter and icing sugar. It is based upon one of Terence Koh’s live performances.
(source includes Kunsthalle Zürich and artnet)