Despite the pretentious title—The Voyage of Lady Midnight Snowdrops Through Double Star Death—Terence Koh's performance one late Spring evening was decidedly more preposterous than pretentious: it took nearly as long to read the title of the work as to see it. A crowd of about 150 had gathered outside the black-and-white Chinese façade of Peres Projects on Chung King Road, facing a stage covered in shredded silver foil and adorned with several sculpture-props covered in sundry Chinese gewgaws coated in tarry black.
This seemed an auspicious backdrop for a performance that intimated grand Beijing-style opera delivered as street theater, but from the start, Koh's Voyage seemed susceptible to misfires. Behind a portable black curtain one could glimpse Koh's elaborate headdress become entangled in wires holding a black obelisk sculpture in place. Nervous titters ensued, and by the time Koh, billed as Beijing diva Ms. Xu Han Wei for the first act, appeared onstage wielding a testicular black barbell and feverishly fending off a "vulture from a very distant galaxy" (picture a stringy black wig lit on fire and suspended from the balcony above) some in attendance were laughing in apparent anticipation of the artist's imminent self-immolation. This silliness may have been intentional, underlining the "sham" in "shaman."
During intermission the stage was sprinkled with Koh's 'signature' flour, a substance whose appearance hinted at transformation while hardly presenting the literal and metaphorical slipperiness of precursors such as Beuys' fat or Barney's petroleum jelly. Wearing a white robe, Koh knelt below a prop that looked like a blobby Twombly sculpture outfitted with a stick and two pendular balls, and opened a series of white boxes while warbling the "libretto" in faux Chinese falsetto. After finding a gold foil mask in the final box, he plastered it to his face with corn syrup, and the spectacle abruptly ended.
Between its fits and starts, the two-act performance felt too hastily enacted: the white powder of the second act might have suggested one reason for the event's accelerated intensity and Koh's jittery hands, not to mention the attendant delusions of grandeur. But whatever trip Koh was on, I found myself impossibly longing for the languid elegance of Jack Smith, as defined by Stefan Brecht: "No pressure, no hurry, no urgency—an infinitely slow, almost pointless, but quite necessary ceremony—theatre." Unlike Smith, Koh sped past that crucial "almost" and went straight to the pointless, proving all that glitters is not necessarily necessary.
frieze, Issue 92, June/July/August 2005