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.'