Terence Koh’s exhibition gone, yet still at the Secession revolves around youth, sleep, withdrawal, sexuality and death. Installed in the Grafisches Kabinett, the work imagines a space in which the artist could spend the rest of his life: a white room of retreat, waiting and possible disappearance.

The title refers to a kind of jisei, a traditional Japanese farewell poem written shortly before death: “gone, yet still / I lie in bed / watching the stars.” Written on thin paper, the text greets visitors on the staircase leading to the exhibition space, turning the ascent into a passage toward silence, exile and transcendence.

Koh combines basic existential furniture such as a bed, chair, shelf and refrigerator with the baroque excess of more than 125 glass vitrines. These contain devotional objects typical of his work: animal figurines, dolls, miniature pop-cultural icons, religious and erotic fragments, insects and ritual traces. Some vitrines are filled with water, others appear broken or disturbed.

The installation creates a queer space in which sexuality is not argued or justified, but simply present. Images of youthful bodies, desire and intimacy coexist with signs of fragility, isolation and death. Rather than offering a strictly autobiographical scene, Koh stages the room as the boudoir of an existence in which death is both certain and unknowable.

The whiteness of the installation produces an atmosphere of calm and transcendence, but this apparent harmony is repeatedly interrupted by shattered vitrines and traces of violence. In this tension between seduction and withdrawal, beauty and destruction, Koh’s work reflects the ambivalence of human existence: the desire to attach oneself to the world and the radical loneliness that remains.