Germaine Koh

Biography

“Knitwork” was begun in 1992 and is still not finished. Germaine Koh takes used clothing, unravels it and re-knits the yarn into one large object that keeps changing. It has been shown in exhibitions in Canada and London: in 2002 at the British Museum it became a performance and installation tied to a conference on contemporary art and artefact.

Koh was born in 1967 in George Town, Malaysia. By one account her family emigrated to Canada when she was two, by another when she was nine. She grew up in Armstrong, British Columbia. At the University of Ottawa she received a degree in studio art (1989) and in theory and history of art (1990), and in 1993 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York. She was also an athlete, playing on the university’s varsity teams in volleyball and badminton.

She works with a wide range of materials, and there is no “typical” Koh piece. In an interview she described her work as attention to the poetics of daily life, to what shapes experience but lies a little below the threshold of notice. To my mind, that formula fits almost all her projects. One of them is “Call”: an old telephone in a public space. When the receiver is lifted, it dials at random the number of a person who has agreed to talk with strangers at any time. An early collaborative project is “ad hoc gallery”, which Koh ran with Geoffrey Brown in 1993–1994. Gunter Nolte, head of the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa, wrote that they were making an enormous contribution to the local art scene and financed the gallery from their own jobs. The project “Sightings” (1992–1998) consisted of commercially printing photographs of ordinary places as postcards. In “Lumber” (1991–1994, dispersed 2002), flexible pieces of recovered lumber, glazed with oil and marine varnish, were installed alongside architecture.

Since 2012 Koh has run “League”, an open group that meets regularly to play sports and games invented by its own members. Play is understood here as a way of solving problems through learning and repetition. The same interest in joining creativity and athletics led to the Koh-Verchere Award for Athletic and Creative Excellence, a student award at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She has coached roller derby teams since 2010, was captain of the Terminal City All-Stars, and in 2017–2018 was Chef de Mission of Team Canada Roller Derby.

Her work has been shown at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, The Power Plant in Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and at the Liverpool, Sydney and Montréal biennials. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2001), Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong (2004), the Vancouver Art Gallery (FUSE, 2013), the Museum of Vancouver (2015) and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (“Crowd Shyness”, 2020). In 2004 she was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award, in 2010 she won a VIVA Award as a mid-career artist in British Columbia, and in 2023 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

In 2018 Koh became the first artist-in-residence in the City of Vancouver engineering department. She was part of the design team for the No. 2 Road North Drainage Pump Station in Richmond, which received the Public Works Association of British Columbia’s Project of the Year award.

In July 2019 residents painted a pipe that was then laid during sewer upgrades; it will stay in use there for about a hundred years. Koh said that taking part in such a “time capsule” gives people a sense of having had a small part in the infrastructure beneath their street.