Terence Koh, who is currently being celebrated with his first solo American museum show at the Whitney, is this month’s art world darling. He is the subject of a recent feature article in New York Magazine, “Is Terence Koh’s Sperm Worth $100,000?”— and, by the way, collectors seem to think it is. Mr. Koh’s work is selling for six figures as fast as he can make it. He has starred in shows this season at Art Basel, the Kunsthalle Zürich, and — having recently been taken under Charles Saatchi’s wing — London’s Royal Academy. Closer to home, Mr. Koh was honored last week with a winterwhite, after-opening, A-list party at Deitch Project’s downtown space, where he was fawned over by art world dignitaries.

Mr. Koh is a sculptor, photographer, printmaker, performance and installation artist, producer of basement porn, and creator of handmade books, ‘zines, and Web sites. A post-modern classicist and self-proclaimed shaman, until recently he was known as the conceptual artist “asianpunkboy.” He has been influenced, either heavily or loosely, by artists such as Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul McCarthy, Karen Finley, Tracey Emin, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Joseph Cornell, as well as the writer Yukio Mishima. But he is one of those rare young artists who — self-invented and self-obsessed, a lithe, sparkling diva dressed to the nines and rocketing skyward — is much more interesting than the work itself.

Born in or around Beijing c. 1977 (there are various and conflicting accounts concerning his biography) and adopted by a Canadian couple, Mr. Koh now lives in New York and is something of a phenomenon — a multicultural, Asian fusion, gay white knight or Great White Hope, if you will — at least as far as his dealer, collectors, bankers, and curators are concerned. But however you want to categorize Mr. Koh, who seems to have knocked Matthew Barney from his Vaselined perch, you are likely to see a lot more of him in the near future.

I imagine that part of what makes Mr. Koh so appealing is that he is sarcastic without being unceremonious; and his art — theatrical, mute, and void; infinitely interpretable — allows viewers to do as much or as little with it as they wish.

Mr. Koh understands the wideopen possibilities of using vague, open-ended symbolism in a world where multiculturalism and globalization have made specificity moot. He works, therefore, with opposites. White is Mr. Koh’s first color choice, and purity is his construct. He uses white plaster, powder, paint, bones, bunnies, fur, mirrors, crystal, glass, and diamond dust. His work, which often evokes collections of artifacts and relics from rituals, or actual rituals themselves, is generally minimal and spare. His objects, often covered in white plaster or paint, include busts, heads, animals, toys, and thrift shop and sex shop wares, all placed meticulously in stacked vitrines, suggesting a clinically frozen loneliness.

But Mr. Koh is both a myth-maker and a realist. He understands that nothing is sacred or permanent — that purity can be soiled by animal urges and bodily functions — specifically sex and death. He is not afraid of the color black, or of spiders, birds, nudity, desire, mold, and decay, all of which he embraces or encourages in his art. Mr. Koh employs vomit, urine, ejaculate, sweat, chocolate, and excrement in his work — materials that, with an indeterminate life span, keep his art in a constant state of flux and his collectors teetering giddily between to have and to have not.

Mr. Koh, a pragmatist in both the real world and the art world, is also not afraid of his baroque sensibilities or his capitalist desires. He wants to make glamorous turds that sell. At Art Basel, the artist plated 88 lumps of his own dried excrement with gold, placed the nuggets in vitrines and lit them with 88 tubes of raining amber neon, which, representing his own sacred urine à la Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” created a moneyed, heaven-sent golden shower — a sold-out installation that inspired one British critic to coin the term “Bling Conceptualism.”

What, then, can you expect at the Whitney? Unfortunately, there is not much to report: I came. I saw. I was blinded.

The Whitney’s site-specific installation, mounted in the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery next to the ground floor elevators, consists of a lit 4,000 watt ArriSun 40/25 movie floodlight mounted on a white tripod, and a semi-hollow lead sphere, 13 inches in diameter, in which has been hidden what is described as a semi-secret talismanic object. The entire gallery is painted flat Super White. Its floor is raised about 6 inches, and the lead sphere, sitting on the floor, is off to the side, so that to see it you must stand to the far left of the installation and peer around the corner.

The light — a big and brassy, cool blue, full-spectrum blast — is head-high and aimed directly at the viewers. To look at it produces a similar effect to that of looking at the midday sun. Therefore, I suggest that, if you choose to engage with Mr. Koh’s installation, you wear sunglasses and you leave his piece to the end of your visit. I also recommend that you bring with you a designated walker, who, like a designated driver, averts his eyes from the artwork; remains cleareyed, and can help you to find your way home.

A lot has been written about the transformational magic and enigmatic allure of Mr. Koh’s work. True, his Whitney installation is both magnetic and repellant. And the barkers can make all of the claims they want to regarding the artwork’s power. But the snake oil either works or it doesn’t. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; a pipe is actually a pipe; and a light, no matter how bright, is just a light.

Until May 27 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).