From Left: Untitled, 2007; Untitled (Vitrines 1-10), 2006, Detail; Cokehead, 2006; Warhol Portrait

     A lot of this is a testament to the work of Javier Peres, the international art dealer who gave up his promising law career at a young age to start working with hip artists and consequently reshape the art market. Peres offered Koh the first show in his space in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and the rest was history.
     When he recently re-created this inaugural installation, The Whole Family, in celebration of Peres’s fifth anniversary in the business, the show’s press release took the form of a much gossiped-about rambling letter from the artist.
     It began with a “WOW” and an exclamation that he couldn’t believe it had been half a decade. This amount of time is nothing in the universe, but it’s just enough time for many young artists’ careers to wax, wane, and drop dead. In Koh’s case, the years have been lucrative enough to replace his materials with more expensive reproductions of the originals. The letter goes on to recall stories of Peres and Koh luxury shopping, firing guns, taking drugs, having sex (with other boys… they’ve long ceased fucking each other), worshipping the night, believing in magic….If one tries to see beyond the glitz that makes Koh’s star shine so brightly, it is challenging to critique his work. He takes great pains to assert that it is about nothing. That is, the objects in his installation are held together by a sense of nothingness which in its own rite is a classically heavy philosophical condition, but then again, he seems to encourage a reading of his work that implies that there’s just nothing there. Baldessari did this famously in his work (some of which has been appropriated by Koh), but in a tongue in cheek way, as if to say that you can never divorce meaning from a constructed object.