CONTROVERSY SEEMS TO follow Terence Koh around like a bad smell. Famous for using excrement, semen, blood and urine in his art, the Beijing-born New Yorker is in London as a guest of collector Charles Saatchi who is showcasing, among other things, Koh's Medusa - a dozen figures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus covered in phalluses, next to a urinal. Saatchi has described Koh as having the 'face of an angel and the soul of a sewer rat'. He has defaced images of angelic child actor Haley Joel Osment with Pepto-Bismol and semen, and has seen a bidding war for his turd encased in gold. At 29, he's also probably one of the youngest artists in the world who can command six-figure sums for their work. 'I'm actually really shy,' he says, nursing a vodka and tonic at a trendy West London hotel. He ran away from a journalist who approached him at the gallery the night before, and says his gallery assistant is about to turn up because he 'isn't very good at interviews'. 'I didn't think Medusa would cause such controversy,' he says, giggling. 'That's not why I do these things. But for some reason, perhaps because the British love both sex and religion so much, when I combined the two it caused a stir. It didn't cause this much controversy in New York. These ideas just pop into my brain.' Koh was born in Beijing but was adopted by a Chinese-Canadian couple when he was six and moved to Canada. He stayed there for 15 years before moving to New York, where he trained and worked as an architect, but gave it up because he 'couldn't deal with a nine-to-five job'. He then began designing book jackets and magazines and made a name as an underground designer before turning to conceptual art. After just five minutes with Koh it becomes clear that, although he's serious about his art, he's also having a blast. And with a lot of his work he's poking fun at the establishment and its musty institutions. He says he feels lucky to have such devoted collectors. 'I thought artists were just poor starving people, but not in today's market. I think I've filled a niche.' This niche means Koh can afford to do pretty much whatever he likes. Although he just spent #5,000 (HK$72,600) on a white goat fur jacket from avant-garde designer outlet Dover Street Market the day before, he says most of his earnings are ploughed straight back into his work. He has just bought a five-floor building in downtown New York, from where he aims to run his Andy Warhol-style factory called the Asian Song Society - he quickly points out the acronym: Ass. Koh is gay, and peppers his conversation with references to male genitalia. At his factory, he'll produce magazines, websites and book designs. His gallery will be on the first floor, and he'll live with his boyfriend on the second. 'And in the basement I'll have a secret opium den,' he says. 'I guess I'm trying to explore my Chinese roots. We're going to have so much fun.' Fun is Koh's primary driving force. He also plans to make music, and his forays into this medium have been no less controversial. A year or so ago he painted his studio black, covered three drum kits with tar and wax and set fire to them. Dressed in a long black wig that covered his face, Koh began shouting in tongues through 20 sub-woofer speakers for 60 seconds. And that was the end of the gig. He and his Los Angeles-based art dealer, Javier Peres, disappeared into the darkness (and a waiting black Mercedes). Koh describes the event as an intense, almost religious, experience. Among Koh's works on display are Crackhead and an installation known as Big White Cock, which includes a neon cockerel - a homage to a now-defunct New York gay bar known as the Cock. When it first opened in New York, Koh painted his gallery black and hired three male strippers for the launch party. 'We had free beer and champagne and invited all these important collectors and VIPs,' he says, laughing. 'Our instructions to the strippers were to get naked and rub themselves against anyone who came in. The VIPs couldn't get out fast enough, but they couldn't see anything because it was totally black. All they could feel was the strippers. The show got closed down after an hour by the cops.' Koh is the first to admit that his art could be a subconscious way of letting his adoptive parents know he's gay - obvious as it may seem. 'They've been very supportive,' he says. 'They had already seen my website before they came to one of my shows, but I've never actually told them I'm gay - even now. At some point they stopped asking. I believe they just accepted it.' Until now, the one thing that Koh has denied incorporating in his work is his ethnicity. 'I wouldn't even consider myself as Chinese really,' he says. 'I lost contact with my real family and I have no desire to trace them. Maybe I do want to subconsciously.' He may just get the chance. In 2008, with assistance from the Art Production Fund - a non-profit organisation that helps artists realise their dream projects - he'll be going to China for the first time since he was a child. Koh hopes the project will coincide with the Beijing Olympics and wants to create a piece of art in a huge public space. 'I want to do the Guernica of China,' he says, referring to Picasso's painting inspired by the artist's horror at the Nazi German bombing of the city during the Spanish civil war. 'There's all this bloodshed and pain and obviously it's very political, but I want to do something that will be very abstract and subconscious - people may not actually get it.' New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London. Ends Nov 4
