Hidden agendas: Theaster Gates

Let's start with the name. It's real: his father is also Theaster Gates, so he's actually the junior version. Theaster means "star of God" - he grew up in the strict tradition of the Baptist faith - and the fact that it contains the word theatre is merely a happy coincidence. He's no relation to Bill (although they've both attended the Economic Forum at Davos) but like that other Gates, he's certainly into portals - though in Theaster's case, it's in an entirely literal, as well as metaphoric, way.

You probably won't have heard of him. Until last year, few people beyond the art scene in his native Chicago would have recognised the name. But in 2012, Gates, 40, appeared as "commissioned artist" at New York's Armory Show art fair in the spring; and in that summer, he was at Documenta, the German exhibition of modern art that lasts for 100 days in the town of Kassel. By November 2012, when ArtReview magazine published its Power 100, he was at No 56 on the list. He had become, as The New Yorker put it, one of those artists who are shifted around the art globe in the way you move a top hat or a thimble in the board-game of Monopoly.

Luckily, he's good at transplants. It's what he does. For Documenta, he took the guts of a decayed house in Chicago and grafted them into a hollowed house in Kassel, once inhabited by Huguenots - Protestant refugees from Catholic France. In New York, he gathered desks from an old primary school, assembled guests and friends, and chalked up conversational themes on school blackboards. In both locations, he sang, because Gates is a performance artist in the usual understanding of the word; with his gospel-influenced band, called The Black Monks of Mississippi, he's serenaded Barack Obama, another Chicago success story. At the recent opening of his White Cube show in Hong Kong, however, his song was an apt solo: Amazing Grace.

The rendition was at the end of a transplanted, jet-lagged day. His first interview that morning was this one, for which he does a good job of simulating let's-go, brisk cheerfulness. (By mid-afternoon, when he takes part in the gallery's media talk with Tim Marlow, White Cube's director of exhibitions, his eyeballs will be fried and his sentences will start … slowly … fading away into …).

The Hong Kong exhibition, "My Back, My Wheel and My Will", is being shown in tandem with another at White Cube Sao Paolo. "It's all been in three years," the artist says, still marvelling at himself, at the amazing speed of his intercontinental moving and shaking.

Part of what's remarkable is that he's an urban planner by training, with a minor in ceramics, who bought a run-down house in dodgy, south-side Dorchester Avenue in 2006, when he was working at the University of Chicago as an arts administrator. The subsequent property salvage, the renewal of adjacent spaces, the gathering of people together over soul-food would, 20 years ago, have been called gentrification. Gates has made it all art.

Even by current art world standards, in which hardly anyone actually paints, he's extending definitions. The only sign of a brush in this show is a tiny black wooden figure, with bristles for her skirt - one of those bits of household bric-a-brac used for polishing that might have seemed golliwog-cute in the past but which induces a cringe nowadays - standing on top of a concrete pillar, and entitled Self-cleaning Stack.