Sporting longish brown curly hair and a skittish glance, American Tom Sachs bounded into Tokyo for his first Tokyo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery, bringing with him a refreshing whiff of New York art culture.

Sachs is accustomed to being shown in major European and New York galleries, and received worldwide notoriety for the "Kill All Artists" performance in 1994. He has become known as a maverick whose main body of work is inspired by commercialism and technology. Sachs subverts received culture in order to present his personal take on various given realities, dualities, functions and roles.

For his piece "Sony Outsider (Gaijin)," which was exhibited in the United States and France last year, he designed a perfect full-scale model, coated in white polyurethane, of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in World War II. The interior is also white, but instead of the bomb's mechanism, it contains a sumptuous leather-covered living space, complete with a sink, urinal and DVD player. The piece suggests that modern-day technology can cause as much destruction as Fat Man did in World War II.

"We're doing the same with fashion and other industries that people were doing with the war 50 years ago," Sachs explained. "Now if you want to kill a country, you don't bomb them, you just give them VCRs. It's the same kind of domination and violence, just without the bullets."

The Tokyo show, however, deals not with such potentially explosive issues as U.S. cultural imperialism and viruses carried by Japanese technology, but instead focuses on the more mundane matter of waste.

The disposal and circulation of fluids, in particular urine, has been assembled into a lively installation of interactive gadgetry. "Test Module 5 (Urinal)" appears to be a slipshod bricolage, but it does indeed function. Sachs uses a urinal (one thinks immediately of Duchamp), tubes and a pump to circulate yellow-colored water, poured from mineral bottles and collected in a bucket.

Sachs matter-of-factly explained how it worked. "You pour some piss into the urinal [he pours in some yellow-colored water] and then you pump it [gurgling sounds] and then you hit the vacuum [sucking sound] and the piss is then sucked out of the bowl into the shock vac. The idea here is that it is a model of plumbing, but it is also an idea of how our bodies work. When it is full, then you can empty it into the piss bucket and start all over again, so it is a cycle, a human cycle."

Not wishing women to be excluded, Sachs thoughtfully provides a shoehorn to enable any keen female the hypothetical opportunity to urinate in the urinal if she wants.

This is art, and art is life, and reality as we know it is suspended. There is something curiously childlike about the inventiveness of this bricolage and the humor in it is hovering around, somewhere.

A small diagram of the plans for "Test Module 5" has been rendered large on the wall opposite the main work.

"This is a drawing of 'Test Module 5,' a study. The idea is always much more meaningful than its realization," Sachs said.

"Test Module 6 (Mini Urinal)" is a miniature of "Module 5" in every respect. Sachs explained that making these models "are all ways of exercising my lust as someone who needs to make things out of found things. There is something really unsexy in dealing with waste. It's fascinating how each culture -- Japan, United States, France -- all deal with their waste in different ways and that's sort of my study and these are my own discoveries in personal waste management."

The show also includes (in what looks like an afterthought or a nod to Japan), two works from his series representing the negative space of objects. Sachs has reproduced a Technics Fl-1200 Mk2 record player, Hello Kitty and My Melody, all with a foam core and colored white.

Displayed off to the side, they are an adjunct to the main Urinal installation and would have been better displayed in a separate room. Still, the white ghostly nature of these "nonforms" could be read as an opportunity to glimpse into yet another peculiarly Sachsian realm of an intriguingly realized idea.