Terence Koh - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Peres Projects, Berlin

  • Exhibited

    Kunsthalle Zürich, Terence Koh, 26 August - 29 October, 2006

  • Literature

    Exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Zürich, Terence Koh, New York, 2006, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    The present lot is a selection of the most important and enormously impressive installation of Terence Koh’s solo show at the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Whitney Museum in 2006.The installation is formed by a labyrinth of stacked vitrines made of glass. This is truly one of Koh’s seminal pieces displaying his control over a language he develops through each of his new installations, embodying all of Koh’s principle interests in the most beautiful manner possible.
     
    “Forceful work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists who has achieved astonishing and outstanding body of works in the last five years. Terence Koh creates works which can be “experienced with great physical and psychological intensity, works that have their own cosmos, in which decadence and deliberate transgression reign. In the process, Koh repeatedly places his own personality at the center, in mythologized, perfect self-glorification…” (Max Hollein, Foreword, Terence Koh-Captain Buddha, NewYork, 2008, p. 89)
     
    The objects on display are highly considered, found and selected from a variety of places ranging from flea markets to specialist porcelain shops. The objects exude a nature of the kitsch, fetishised, cult or gothic. Koh collects the objects as if producing a catalogue of dreams and secrets installed in a cabinet of curiosity of unattainable truths about the hidden life of the artist’s mind. A sense of distance is relayed from the vitrines yet we are intrigued by its transparency and method of presentation and drawn in by the objects and their ability to engage with our imagination.
     
    An important aspect of Koh’s work is the idea of the monochrome, and the complex sculptural installations which are clad in a singular colour presenting a sea of singularity formed out of a mountain of various objects.
    In our present lot Koh subjects all of his collected objects to a ritualistic cleansing by removing their histories, personalities, and their all together identities as he drowns them in white paint, plaster, or wax. The use of
    white comes with a myriad of symbolically charged associations: purity, the sublime, and innocence. It also presents a contrast between the East and West as in eastern cultures white represents death and in the west it
    represents birth and rebirth .The all encompassing iridescent white in this work is both beautiful and overpowering presence engulfing its audience in a metaphorical transcendence; The work is radiant, intimidating and immersive all at the same time. As Koh covered the objects with new whiteness he reincarnated them in a symbolist action that transforms the banal into the coveted and precious. The objects now appear cleansed, as if baptized, yet the whiteness also induces a sense of emptiness and sorrow as the objects no longer feel alive but preserved and removed from our reality. The pureness of the white makes this work particularly elegant in a minimalist sense employing principles of a removed modern aesthetic, this ultimately triggers the idea of removal through addition. To remove history and identity Koh needed to add the white, are we presented with more or less?
     
    The idea of white conjures the desire for perfection, an exclusive obsession that comes with the obvious realization that the strive to reach perfection in any state is unachievable, thus leaving the audience with concepts of desire and longing for an unavailable result. The virginal impossibility of the pigment white induces a feeling of lust, emptiness and sorrow, Koh understands that the pigment is as elemental as it is totalizing, and that the act of enlightenment always presents the risk of being blinded. Conscious of this power, Koh plays a game with the visible and the invisible, engaging with his audience on a far deeper level than the visual. The overall result of this important work is that of gothic romanticism: It is a visual black-hole somewhere between baroque and minimalism work of melancholic beauty laden with symbolism that is deeply personal to the artist yet universal in a way that captures its audience in a labyrinth of dreams and secret desires. The work takes it’s own interwoven contradictions and exploits them to produce a moment of sublime transcendence of emptiness and the relationship between life and death. “Koh’s themes are always the great themes of humanity: life and death; youth and decay; beauty and sickness; cultural identity and individual personality; sexuality; refinement and the other; things controlled by conventions of our culture; and the ideas of Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, which run through the most diverse cultures” (Ruff, B. Terence Koh Whitney-Kunsthalle Zurich –Yale, 2006, p. 5)

305

Untitled (White Light #1)

2006
Mixed media installation comprised of paint, plaster, wax, porcelain, wood, metal, bones, skulls, plastic, bronze and organic materials in 42 glass vitrines.
Installation dimensions variable; approximately as illustrated: 272 x 185 x 190 cm. (107 x 73 x 75 in).
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Estimate
£50,000 - 70,000 

Sold for £67,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London