Discover Terence Koh: Gone, yet still – An Immersive Installation at Secession

Terence Koh's exhibition 'Gone, yet still' explores themes of youth, sleep, and death, creating an immersive installation in the Secession's Graphic Cabinet. The exhibition uses stark white environments and over 125 glass vitrines filled with personal objects to reflect on desire, queer spaces, and the contemplation of mortality.

Terence Koh's exhibition in the Secession, titled 'Gone, yet still', delves into the complex themes of youth, sleep, and death, aiming to create an environment where the artist could potentially spend the rest of his life. The exhibition's title, a shortened form of a Japanese farewell poem ('Jisei'), sets a tone of introspection and passage. The installation, primarily in the Graphic Cabinet, is rendered entirely in white, transforming the space into a passage toward silence, emptiness, and retreat. Koh combines existential furnishings like a bed and a shelf with over 125 aquarium-sized glass vitrines. These are filled with a variety of objects, described as 'devotionalia,' including animal figures, dolls, marble busts, figurines, and statues, some containing water or traces of rituals. The work is permeated with symbols and an atmosphere of queer sexuality, presenting young bodies, faces, and intimate details. Koh seeks to create queer spaces where sexuality is depicted as a fundamental aspect of being, free from moralistic or restrictive constraints, serving as a temptation to forget existential unease and fragmentation. Koh illustrates the dichotomy of human existence: the intense desire to experience the world versus profound loneliness. The exhibition confronts death as an abstract concept, imagined as either relief or threat within the solitary confinement of a room, with the glass cases resembling sarcophagi. This seemingly harmonious scene is disrupted by scattered and damaged vitrines, introducing an element of violence and unpredictability that reminds viewers of the unforeseen events preceding death.

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