Much of this revolves around the good times to be had at Koh’s Chinatown palace, a multi-story building inconspicuous from the outside, save for the nights on which dozens of pretty young things — and those who love them — spill out from the bowels of Koh’s Asia Song Society (a.k.a. ASS), a gallery of sorts (sometimes doubling as a porn studio or sex club), of which Koh says “all the artists in the shows are selected based solely (and publicly) on the fact that they are hot and sexy.” Upstairs, the rooms of his home are mostly bare and everything is covered in a white veneer, from the fl oors to the kitchen surfaces to the plates on which party favors are served. Koh’s “Big White Cock”, a white neon outline of a rooster, hangs on the wall, drawing allusion to the ingredients sold in the neighborhood’s Asian stores and restaurants, to the variety of euphemisms for which chickens stand in gay slang, and of course to the allure of shiny cocks. This is to say nothing of race, though it’s a topic Koh often addresses. He began his art career as an internet art star known as Asianpunkboy. His “dirt style” website, evoking the design of early-‘90s sites and sprinkled with animated gifs of cockshots, sound clips, and the artist’s drawings, was his answer to the question “truth or dare”, with the online diary offering proof of his now-famously “daring” lifestyle, the biggest commodity in which he trades. Koh still sees the net as an important place to work, even if he can’t clearly state why. When asked why he was compelled to work online, he emails, “The internet is very important ‘cause it’s a new idea of information. We live now in the age of the idea of information. The net has the most potential as of this moment I know to transmit that idea [sic].”
     But in recent years he’s upgraded from websites and artist books to a more gallery-based practice that employs a different set of codes and binaries — black and white, light and dark, good and evil. Despite the gothic overtones of many of his projects, it’s the white that often wins out in this sepulchral palette. Knick-knacks get dusted in it, bodies performing under Koh’s direction get doused in it, and the floors of the gallery spaces in which he exhibits are often sprinkled with heavy coats of fresh powder, so that visitors’ feet cut lines into the heavenly snowfall before tracking corn-starchy footprints out onto the street in inadvertent advertisements of where the party’s at.
     It is obvious to anyone that Koh is having fun in his work. One need not see the infamous Artforum diary photos of him cavorting in fur coats and glittery stretch pants to know this. The list of materials in his installations tends to drive the point home. Take, for instance, his sculpture entitled, These Decades that We Never Sleep, Black Light, in which the list of ingredients (“crystal chandelier, paint, lollipops, vegetable matter, human and horse hair, mineral oil, rope from a ship found af ter midnight, glass shards, stones, and artist’s blood and shit”) offers proof that Koh stays out past bedtime.
     His Black Drums from the same series — a drum kit covered in black goo and seemingly expelled from the dark magic universe in which Koh works, a gunkedup tail of black rope coiled behind it, features many of the same items but adds cum to the sanguine mix. To those collectors obsessed with archivability, these sculptures may read as bittersweet jokes, but Koh’s investors seem to be in on the act. They all sign releases before taking home objects made out of food and excrement which are, by-design, ephemeral and doomed to melt, decay, or mold over. Despite the risks, the collectors are gambling that no one will ever think Koh’s work stinks.