Taking place outdoors on the McMichael grounds on summer nights, tomorrow’s snow was a brief, performative glimpse into the vision of Beijing-born, Canadian-raised artist Terence Koh. Inspired by a passage from Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, the piece recreated the look of freshly fallen snow, with an 8-year-old boy and girl, dressed in white, making snow angels. An ephemeral yet enduringly powerful performance piece, tomorrow’s snow represented Koh’s first solo showing in Canada and marked the debut of a new phase of his work.
Koh’s oeuvre employs a diverse range of media, including drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and complex large-scale installations. Originally working under the alias asianpunkboy, Koh designed zines and custom-made books and quickly cultivated a dedicated following. By 2004, Koh was creating work under his real name and had developed a public persona of enigmatic behavior—the artist wears only white, lives in an all white environment, writes in a cryptically poetic way and is intentionally unclear on such basic biographical details as his date of birth and his childhood home. Whilst the influence of his artistic forebears—including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars—is often cited, Koh has developed what is clearly one of the most important and original voices to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century.
World premiere at the McMichael. Produced and commissioned as part of the Luminato Festival, 2014