TERENCE KOH

Interview by Filep Motwary

Canadian artist Terence Koh has been busy working on a treehouse project in New York which is based on generosity. More than two decades after he launched the legendary website Asian Punk Boy, the once-distant fashion and art icon crushes that enigmatic image of himself through a video call from his backyard in Los Angeles, revealing a character filled with kindness and modesty.

FILEP MOTWARY: I discovered your work through your website, Asian Punk Boy, which you made in the early 2000s. How does that relate to what you have become today?

TERENCE KOH: I haven’t thought about those times that often because I try not to entangle myself in the past. But the website became a form of communication and my way of reaching out to somebody else in the world. It’s almost like the idea of being on an island, and putting out the signal, like a lighthouse.

FM: And yet, even if you didn’t know it, those pictures were shared all over.

TK: I think I knew because from just doing this website in the middle of nowhere, art galleries and curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist and AA Bronson somehow heard about it through word of mouth.

FM: You had this notion of beauty that was both macabre and poetic. What does beauty mean to you?

TK: I think it’s about the human vessel opening up and being able to find beauty in a toilet seat in a dirty bar or a piece of gum stuck on the side of the road. It’s not a beauty that’s framed by society or civilization or language, because so easily the word beauty is framed by others, by what a magazine or what an editorial believes beauty is. But beauty is the inner dialogue: it opens up and allows you to see beauty in everything.

FM: What led you to become an artist?

TK: When I started, I didn’t know I was going to become an artist. I was studying graphic design in Canada then, and I was starting to do all these books. At that time, I thought I was more like a graphic designer than an artist. But, over time, I wanted more freedom to do exactly what I felt was right for me, so that’s how I started shifting from books to making objects and performances and videos and stuff like that.

FM:!You work in many different media. Which medium has been important to your self-discovery?

TK: I don’t think there is any one specific art form that leads to who I am today. All these forms of media contributed to whom I have become. When you make an artwork, at least for me anyway, they’re all self-portraits, but a self-portrait that is about everybody else as well. I think that’s why I work in so many different media because I’m curious about other facets of humanity itself. Photography is a very different thing from sculpture, which is a very different thing from performance. But, when I’m doing different things, I’m still hoping to achieve the same thing, which is this universal connection to the universe.

FM: What is your take on the evolution of humanity as it is now enhanced with technology?

TK: I would call myself dismissive, simply because I don’t see technology, Instagram or TikTok, as being bad or good; I see it as a different form of communication. Because we’re imperfect human vessels, I think the problem is not technology itself but the balance between technology and our human nature. We depend too much on technology these days— the ways we communicate or tell our stories—and that unbalances us because technology is a part of civilization that wants to have more of everything. Technology has made us more selfish and although it’s only a tool, we fell into the habit, because it’s so easy to use.
Due to that, we get frustrated, we have all these wars, and competitive natures, and all these ugly things, and that’s where perhaps technology has become negative. That’s why I handwrite my text messages and emails, instead of typing, because it takes more of my time. There are also mistakes when you write, and you can erase things and this can make you more involved in using your senses. Technology disconnected us from our senses, as it is more visual, it’s noise. How can you leave your senses behind, the smells, touching different surfaces or how fruits taste or even the invisible senses of, like, trees talking to you and the flowers and the clouds passing by?

FM: What other concepts have you found yourself getting stuck with lately?

TK: What I’ve gotten stuck with lately is a question for you as well: do you believe that, right now, every moment right in front of you is the most beautiful photograph, sound work, poetry, sculpture, dance, ever? For me, every moment that I see, even if I’m taking a piss or something, I take it as the most beautiful performance right there. Or, if I’m pay-ing, if I’m going to a cashier, and I’m interacting, I see it as a very beautiful performance right in that very moment. I couldn’t, myself, replicate any other more beautiful sculpture or video of that than the moment itself.

FM: So what is the role of chance in what you do? Is it necessary for you to follow some kind of routine to get into the headspace to create, or not, since you appreciate every moment, as you say?

TK: I don’t know; I’m quite perplexed by that as well. One needs to get into a routine of waking up in the morning and drawing, but whether it comes, it comes by chance, it comes by divine intervention, that, I don’t know. And I struggle with it, because I have this vision of myself that I could be a monk and I would wake up and the first thing I would do is draw, and I would draw for six hours and take a break, and not be distracted by everything else. But I’ve never been able to get into this discipline, even though I think it would be so good for me. So I’ve never been able to get into a routine of things, and I’ve been more like a spontaneous kind of artist in that way. But I don’t know whether I’m a better artist because of that, or whether I could be a much better, responsible artist if I was more disciplined.

FM: How do you feel when you finally see a completed piece? Do you get emotional?

TK: In the past, when things were finished, I definitely would get emotional, especially when I would do a full installation and I would have to leave because it was in a different country and I was flying back home. But I think these days I feel differently. For example, in the project that I was doing in the East Village, when I left the project, it kept on growing as it does not get finished because it’s up to the community to continue what I started. In the past, I was more emotionally attached to these things but I think that, as an artist, for myself anyways, I would like to grow out of that as it ties me down to all kinds of being stuck in the past and many different things.

FM: But when you put your heart into something, your time, your devotion, is it possible to disconnect?

TK: Of course it’s possible but it’s very, very hard because most of us are so intertwined with the idea of time, the idea of being linear and having to move on, and to see goals and to see these things. To put it differently: I feel that our whole reason for living as human beings is to escape time. Is it possible to fall out of time? Definitely, but it’s both very hard and very easy at the same time. To escape out of time, for me, means to be timeless, as it is the closest to my definition of what love is. Not emotional love but love as in something timeless.

So it’s very hard for anyone to be timeless, because ever since we were born, when we learned the word “mummy”, or we learned how to walk and we learned how to achieve things, everything teaches us to be in time itself. Even the whole reason for our being is to escape time and enter this universal energy of things.
And, subconsciously, I think that everybody wants to escape these binds of time, even if they know it or not, but no one ever teaches us in school or anywhere what these big questions are. But how? I’m not sure how to answer that.

FM: So you were in New York building a tree house. What purpose does a treehouse serve in a big city like New York?

TK: What was amazing about the project is that New York is such a great place for it. I travel around the world, but New York has the greatest concentration of diversity of humans and diversity of structures. It is a super busy place but then in the East Village, where this project is—which is also an extremely busy place, with cafes and shops and lots of buildings and lots of people living there—you also have this glimpse of nature. These community gardens around the East Village are natural spaces outside the concrete jungle of New York City, where you pass by and you see trees and birds and little hidden corners that many people don’t. It’s really quite magical to go from the urban street of New York and then you open up a gate and you’re suddenly in the forest itself.
The gardens have existed in the East Village for decades and people had to fight for the right to have them. It took a lot of effort.

When you walk through them, it feels timeless because they could be in the country of Northern Italy or Belgium. The trees are all surrounded by birdsong, bees and insects water dripping down, and trees rustling— beautiful sounds that you never really listen to when you’re on the streets of the big city. ! When I was invited to do this project, it was almost like a dream. They chose this garden for me because there were tree beehives there and it linked with another project on bees that I did a few years back. There was this platform in a garden placed where the old beehives were just when it was about to be moved, and I was asked to do something with it. It was 12, 15 feet up in the air and kind of falling apart.
My immediate idea was to build a treehouse and have people be able to access this place because it’s so very special when you climb up the thing and you’re up in the air at the sightline of the trees and you can see their movements and the light. You almost forget you’re in the middle of New York City, until you notice maybe 20 feet away that there’s an apartment building with someone’s living room there as well. It’s this crazy mix of New York City and nature all at once.

FM: There was a children’s workshop going on the day we shot your portrait, right?

TK: Yes, we were planning a children’s workshop. I thought my role as the artist was not to build the whole treehouse, but the idea was to build just the skeleton and the empty shell of a treehouse so that the community members could come together and finish up what I started. I saw this treehouse as almost like a stained glass church, a stained glass treehouse so that people could contribute translucent and transparent materials, and then we would start building up from these different elements over time, and it would all add up to this very colorful stained glass effect. And then we also planted different kinds of plants and bee-friendly flowers all around, so that they would move around the tree-house and start integrating between human interaction and nature itself.
So, in a sense, it’s a more organic version of what I started with as Asian Punk Boy back in the day, where I created almost the structure of the website and then all the plugins get plugged in over time into a three-dimensional framework, so it’s always growing. I never thought about it but I guess it is, in a way, the same thing I was doing almost 22 years ago. !

FM: Do you worry about nature and the environment? Can nature make us better people?

TK: I don’t think nature can make us better people; I think people have to make themselves better people, and nature is just nature. That’s why I don’t worry about it; I care very deeply about nature but, at the same time, I’m not emotionally attached to it because we can destroy nature so badly and, on top of that, we attach our emotional values to nature.

FM: Do you think that people can be politically or environmentally active in more subtle ways?

TK: Of course we can, because it’s the individual that can change everything. I think we rely too much on hoping that politics or art or engineers can solve all these problems in the world today. It has to start with each person and how we perceive the world.

FM: Are we jinxed, do you think? Are we cursed to suffer so much?

TK: We are not cursed. I think we are actully blessed to suffer because it’s in this suffering that we glimpse what the possibilities are. While working on projects, a part of me wishes we could all be kinder. And I do get depressed because I see the possibilities of what our lives could be, the possibilities of living in villages where we respected the elders and strangers and took  care of different cultures and different things.Instead of the hellhole of going to JFK yesterday, where no one was helpful and people were just rushing. It’s easy to get depressed by all that, its so easy to fall into that trap. I think that, very slowly, we are progressing and moving on towards this universal thing, trying to escape these bonds of time and understand this thing which is true beauty, true love, which is not about the self. When we forget about ourselves and our selfish needs we move on as humans and progress in that sense. We are doing it very slowly. I see it in all kinds of different ways. So, in the end, I’m very hopeful for humanity.

FM: What do you think about longevity?

TK: That’s not something I would want to think about, because longevity is about time as well, it’s about wanting to preserve things. As humans, we think that we want to preserve and we want to accumulate all this wealth and ideas and information and friends, but in the end, when you die, all these things don’t matter.
When you think about longevity, you trap yourself and you’re becoming older, whereas the whole reason for being is to escape from this longevity and then you will be eternal.