David Choe
Encyclopedia
David Choe is an American painter, muralist, graffiti artist and graphic novelist of Korean descent. He achieved art world success with his "dirty style" figure paintings—raw, frenetic works which combine themes of desire, degradation, and exaltation. Outside of galleries, he is closely identified with the bucktoothed whale he has been spray-painting on the streets since he was in his teens.
Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. For example, he provided the cover art for Jay-Z
and Linkin Park
's multi-platinum album Collision Course
, and created artwork to decorate the sets of Juno
and The Glass House
. In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker
, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook
's first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office. Those murals were loosely re-created by Choe's friends Rob Sato and Joe To for the set of the film The Social Network
. During the 2008 presidential race, Choe painted a portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama for use in a grassroots street art campaign. The original now hangs in the White House.
, the child of Korean
immigrant parents who were born-again Christians. Like many boys, his chief interests were Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Robotech and superheroes, which he drew obsessively from an early age. In his early teens, in response to having his bicycle stolen repeatedly, he began to retaliate by stealing bikes and shoplifting whenever the opportunity arose. In 1990, inspired by L.A. graffiti pioneers Mear One
and Hex, he started venting his teenage anger by scrawling graffiti on bus benches, billboards and back alleys across the city. With his first can of Krylon flat black, he cited the Bible verse John 11:35, which reads "Jesus wept
." Rather than writing his name over and over, he painted faces and figures, cartoony whales, and punchy philosophical messages. Though he lived in Koreatown, he went to high school in the privileged enclave of Beverly Hills, and by the time the 1992 Los Angeles riots
broke out when he was 16, he had become acutely aware of the class and racial tensions that divided the city into mutually hostile territories. A proud participant in the violence and mayhem that ensued, he claims that he and his brother were the only Koreans who looted. After the six-day riot had subsided, he discovered that his parents' real estate business in Koreatown had burned to the ground, which made the next few years difficult for his family.
Immediately after graduating from high school, Choe departed on the first of many adventures, and spent the next two years freight-hopping, hitchhiking, hustling and stealing his way around the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When he returned to Los Angeles at the age of 21, he decided he needed formal training if he wanted to be a "real" artist, and enrolled in the only art school that accepted him, the California College of Arts & Crafts
in Oakland. There he came under the influence of professor Barron Storey
's raw, intimate, painterly style. Choe, who calls Storey "the current king of the dirty school," studied under the veteran illustrator for two years and then dropped out. All the while, he was stealing art supplies, books and food to get by, in addition to his ongoing nocturnal graffiti campaign, which eventually landed him in jail in Oakland for a week. Taking that as incentive to settle down a bit, he returned to his family home in Los Angeles, and began illustrating and writing for magazines including Hustler
, Ray Gun
and Vice
. Around the same time, he began his ongoing relationship with the Asian pop culture store-cum-magazine Giant Robot
, which has continued to be mutually beneficial to this day. He also started showing his paintings to art galleries, which exhibited little interest. In defiance, Choe hung his work in an ice cream shop called Double Rainbow which was located on the hipster promenade Melrose Avenue
. That impromptu exhibition was so successful that the store held it over for two years, with Choe replenishing pieces as they sold.
Always fascinated by comics, especially the work of Jim Lee
, Rob Liefeld
and Todd McFarlane
, Choe initially dreamed of a career as a comic book creator. In a single night in 1996, he wrote a 35-page tale of violent sexual obsession which, coupled with drawings and paintings that he created over the next couple of years, eventually became the graphic novel Slow Jams. Choe initially made about 200 copies of Slow Jams on a photocopier and gave them away at Comic-Con in 1998, hoping to interest a publisher. Later that year, he submitted Slow Jams for the Xeric Grant and was awarded $5,000 to self-publish a second, expanded edition of 1,000 which came out in 1999 with a cover price of $4. Over the next decade, Slow Jams became a cult phenomenon, and in recent years, increasingly rare copies of the graphic novel have changed hands on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
Having caught the attention of the entertainment and advertising industry with Slow Jams and that makeshift art exhibit, Choe soon found himself in great demand for commercial illustration and graphic design. Within a few years, he was successful enough to be able to turn down many offers of commercial work in order to concentrate on his own paintings and murals. Simultaneously, Choe's best friend Harry Kim began documenting his life, often living with him while videotaping his frenzied art-making, colorful personal life and intimate thoughts. Over the next 10 years, Kim would capture thousands of hours of Choe's everyday existence as an artist, footage which would eventually become the documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. All the while, Choe continued his obsessive traveling, from making an expedition to the jungles of the Congo to painting graffiti and murals around the globe alongside the world's greatest urban artists for the street culture brand Upper Playground.
In late 2003, Choe arrived in Tokyo and was jailed within 24 hours. An undercover security guard had approached him threateningly, and due to the language barrier, he misunderstood the man's intentions and reacted instinctively, punching him in the face. Choe ended up spending three months behind bars for violent assault, out of contact with his family or friends, and under threat of being imprisoned for two years. During that time, he suffered greatly from loneliness, anxiety and a lack of access to art materials. With small pieces of paper and the one pen his cell was allowed, he made over 600 drawings during that period, including portraits of his Japanese cellmates which he used to distract them from beating him up. In his desperation, he also executed a series of erotic paintings using soy sauce, tea, blood and urine for color. After three months, he was released on the condition that he leave Japan immediately and not return. His prison art has been the subject of constant speculation and interest ever since.
Returning home to San Jose
with a new perspective on life, Choe began the task of rebuilding himself from the ground up, focusing hard on his career and channeling his more self-destructive impulses into somewhat less risky pursuits such as gambling and drumming. Burying himself in work, he accepted mural commissions from Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss
and from the founders of Facebook, among others. After holding several solo shows in San Jose and San Francisco, he was offered a solo exhibit at the Santa Rosa
Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. He held his first New York solo exhibit, "Gardeners of Eden," in 2007 at Jonathan Levine Gallery in Chelsea, and in 2008, he had his first UK solo exhibition, "Murderous Heart," in both the London and Newcastle locations of Lazarides Gallery, simultaneously.
Having become accustomed to living under the constant eye of Harry Kim's camera, it was a natural next step for him to allow a reality-style film crew to accompany him on some of his adventures. For a web series called Thumbs Up!, which has so far run for three seasons, Choe and Harry Kim were filmed hitch-hiking and freight-hopping from Los Angeles to Miami and Tijuana to Alaska, and then hitching across China from Beijing to Shenzen and the gambling mecca of Macau.
It has often been said that Choe's greatest artwork is his life, itself. As his friend Jason Jaworski explained, "For me, there is no artwork Dave or anyone can create that is capable of completely equalling the vast canvas of Dave's life, which he paints daily while simply living. At the core, there seems to be two types of art, one which allows for escape from one's self, and another which allows for introspection and confrontation with one's self. In either case, I think art's great contribution is when it makes one feel less alone. And if that statement has truth to it, which it does for me, then Dave has created one of the greatest pieces of art by simply living the way he does, which is like no one else."
Over the past 15 years, Choe has built a worldwide reputation for his raw, vibrant, frenetic imagery, exhibiting in galleries in Barcelona, Beijing, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, New York, and many places in between. He says he makes art because he has no other choice. "I don’t know how many times I have to say this—in all honesty and all kidding aside—without art I’d be 110% dead or in jail. I have a murderer’s blood coursing through my veins. I try to be good, but I’m just a bad man who happens to know how to wield a pencil and smear paint in fancy ways."
While Choe's success has largely hinged on his paintings, he has been commissioned to paint murals all over the world, and still paints on the street for his own gratification. As he told Juxtapoz magazine, “I never stopped graffiti. It influences my fine art, with the quickness and immediacy of it. I use oil paint like it’s acrylic, because I can’t wait for it to dry. I love fucking with mediums and seeing how they react to different mediums, but I always considered graffiti separate from my art. I always looked at it as destructive, anarchist, political, spiritual, and mostly just fun. It was a release from being cooped up, hunched over drawing tiny drawings with rapidographs and mechanical pencils. Fuck everything I’m doing at home, I‘m going out late at night to have an affair with the streets. I’m not worried about mistakes, or trying to make shit look right, or fame, or writing a tag over and over—I’m looking to destroy, pure vandalism, and maybe somewhere in between the process I can achieve enlightenment, fulfillment, and redemption, but probably not. You can’t ever really describe the feeling until you’ve stolen two cans of Krylon flat black and hit the streets with reckless abandon. The freedom of speech, and scale of the words and pictures, is humbling.”
Cursiv, Giant Robot, 2003.
Bruised Fruit: The Art of David Choe, Drips Inc., 2002.
Slow Jams, self-published, 1999.
Thumbs Up! documentary web series, VBS.TV, (2007–2011)
Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. For example, he provided the cover art for Jay-Z
Jay-Z
Shawn Corey Carter , better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and occasional actor. He is one of the most financially successful hip hop artists and entrepreneurs in America, having a net worth of over $450 million as of 2010...
and Linkin Park
Linkin Park
Linkin Park is an American rock band from Agoura Hills, California. Formed in 1996, the band rose to international fame with their debut album, Hybrid Theory, which was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2005 and multi-platinum in several other countries...
's multi-platinum album Collision Course
Collision Course (album)
Critics were divided over Collision Course, with some praising the album, while others negatively received it.David Jeffries of allmusic praised the album, calling it "awesomely fun". K.B...
, and created artwork to decorate the sets of Juno
Juno (film)
Juno is a 2007 comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Ellen Page stars as the title character, an independent-minded teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy and the subsequent events that put pressures of adult life onto her. Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby, J. K....
and The Glass House
The Glass House (film)
The Glass House is a 2001 film directed by Daniel Sackheim and written by Wesley Strick.-Plot:Sixteen-year-old Ruby and eleven-year-old Rhett lose their parents in a car accident...
. In 2005, internet entrepreneur Sean Parker
Sean Parker
Sean Parker is an American technology businessman and entrepreneur. He co-founded Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and Airtime, and was Facebook's founding president. His net worth is estimated at $2.1 billion.-Early life:...
, a longtime fan, asked him to paint graphic sexual murals in the interior of Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
's first Silicon Valley office, and in 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...
commissioned him to paint somewhat tamer murals for their next office. Those murals were loosely re-created by Choe's friends Rob Sato and Joe To for the set of the film The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...
. During the 2008 presidential race, Choe painted a portrait of then-Senator Barack Obama for use in a grassroots street art campaign. The original now hangs in the White House.
Life
David Choe was raised in the racially diverse Koreatown neighborhood of Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, the child of Korean
Korean people
The Korean people are an ethnic group originating in the Korean peninsula and Manchuria. Koreans are one of the most ethnically and linguistically homogeneous groups in the world.-Names:...
immigrant parents who were born-again Christians. Like many boys, his chief interests were Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Robotech and superheroes, which he drew obsessively from an early age. In his early teens, in response to having his bicycle stolen repeatedly, he began to retaliate by stealing bikes and shoplifting whenever the opportunity arose. In 1990, inspired by L.A. graffiti pioneers Mear One
Mear One
Mear One, born 1971 as Kalen Ockerman in Santa Cruz, California, is a Los Angeles-based artist, famously known for his often-political street graffiti art. Commonly referred to as the 'Michelangelo' of graffiti, Mear One is commonly associated with CBS and WCA crews...
and Hex, he started venting his teenage anger by scrawling graffiti on bus benches, billboards and back alleys across the city. With his first can of Krylon flat black, he cited the Bible verse John 11:35, which reads "Jesus wept
Jesus wept
Jesus wept is a phrase famous for being the shortest verse in the King James Version of the Bible, as well as many other versions, though it is not the shortest in the original languages...
." Rather than writing his name over and over, he painted faces and figures, cartoony whales, and punchy philosophical messages. Though he lived in Koreatown, he went to high school in the privileged enclave of Beverly Hills, and by the time the 1992 Los Angeles riots
1992 Los Angeles riots
The 1992 Los Angeles Riots or South Central Riots, also known as the 1992 Los Angeles Civil Unrest were sparked on April 29, 1992, when a jury acquitted three white and one hispanic Los Angeles Police Department officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King following a...
broke out when he was 16, he had become acutely aware of the class and racial tensions that divided the city into mutually hostile territories. A proud participant in the violence and mayhem that ensued, he claims that he and his brother were the only Koreans who looted. After the six-day riot had subsided, he discovered that his parents' real estate business in Koreatown had burned to the ground, which made the next few years difficult for his family.
Immediately after graduating from high school, Choe departed on the first of many adventures, and spent the next two years freight-hopping, hitchhiking, hustling and stealing his way around the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When he returned to Los Angeles at the age of 21, he decided he needed formal training if he wanted to be a "real" artist, and enrolled in the only art school that accepted him, the California College of Arts & Crafts
California College of the Arts
California College of the Arts , founded in 1907, is known for its broad, interdisciplinary programs in art, design, architecture, and writing. It has two campuses, one in Oakland and one in San Francisco, California, USA...
in Oakland. There he came under the influence of professor Barron Storey
Barron Storey
Barron Storey is an art teacher and artist. He is famous for his accomplishments as an illustrator and fine artist, and for his influence on several professional illustrators and writers, including Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean, Simon Bisley, Bill Koeb, Kent Williams, George Pratt...
's raw, intimate, painterly style. Choe, who calls Storey "the current king of the dirty school," studied under the veteran illustrator for two years and then dropped out. All the while, he was stealing art supplies, books and food to get by, in addition to his ongoing nocturnal graffiti campaign, which eventually landed him in jail in Oakland for a week. Taking that as incentive to settle down a bit, he returned to his family home in Los Angeles, and began illustrating and writing for magazines including Hustler
Hustler
Hustler is a monthly pornographic magazine aimed at men and published in the United States. It was first published in 1974 by Larry Flynt. It was a step forward from the Hustler Newsletter which was cheap advertising for his strip club businesses at the time. The magazine grew from a shaky start to...
, Ray Gun
Ray Gun (magazine)
Ray Gun was an American alternative rock-and-roll magazine, first published in 1992 in Santa Monica, California. Led by founding art director David Carson, Ray Gun explored experimental magazine typographic design. The result was a chaotic, abstract style, not always readable, but distinctive in...
and Vice
Vice (magazine)
VICE is a free magazine and media conglomerate founded in Montreal, Quebec and currently based in New York City.Vice is available in 27 countries...
. Around the same time, he began his ongoing relationship with the Asian pop culture store-cum-magazine Giant Robot
Giant Robot (magazine)
Giant Robot is a bi-monthly magazine of Asian and Asian American popular culture founded in 1994. It was initially created as a small, punk-minded magazine that featured Asian pop culture and Asian American alternative culture, including such varied subject matter as history, art, music, film,...
, which has continued to be mutually beneficial to this day. He also started showing his paintings to art galleries, which exhibited little interest. In defiance, Choe hung his work in an ice cream shop called Double Rainbow which was located on the hipster promenade Melrose Avenue
Melrose Avenue
Melrose Avenue is an internationally renowned shopping, dining and entertainment destination in Los Angeles that starts from Santa Monica Boulevard at the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and ends at Lucille Avenue in Silver Lake...
. That impromptu exhibition was so successful that the store held it over for two years, with Choe replenishing pieces as they sold.
Always fascinated by comics, especially the work of Jim Lee
Jim Lee
Jim Lee is a Korean-American comic book artist, writer, editor and publisher. He first broke into the industry in 1987 as an artist for Marvel Comics, illustrating titles such as Alpha Flight and Punisher War Journal, before gaining a great deal of popularity on The Uncanny X-Men...
, Rob Liefeld
Rob Liefeld
Rob Liefeld is an American comic book writer, illustrator, and publisher. A prominent artist in the 1990s, he has since become a controversial figure in the medium....
and Todd McFarlane
Todd McFarlane
Todd McFarlane is a Canadian cartoonist, writer, toy designer and entrepreneur, best known for his work in comic books, such as the fantasy series Spawn....
, Choe initially dreamed of a career as a comic book creator. In a single night in 1996, he wrote a 35-page tale of violent sexual obsession which, coupled with drawings and paintings that he created over the next couple of years, eventually became the graphic novel Slow Jams. Choe initially made about 200 copies of Slow Jams on a photocopier and gave them away at Comic-Con in 1998, hoping to interest a publisher. Later that year, he submitted Slow Jams for the Xeric Grant and was awarded $5,000 to self-publish a second, expanded edition of 1,000 which came out in 1999 with a cover price of $4. Over the next decade, Slow Jams became a cult phenomenon, and in recent years, increasingly rare copies of the graphic novel have changed hands on eBay for hundreds of dollars.
Having caught the attention of the entertainment and advertising industry with Slow Jams and that makeshift art exhibit, Choe soon found himself in great demand for commercial illustration and graphic design. Within a few years, he was successful enough to be able to turn down many offers of commercial work in order to concentrate on his own paintings and murals. Simultaneously, Choe's best friend Harry Kim began documenting his life, often living with him while videotaping his frenzied art-making, colorful personal life and intimate thoughts. Over the next 10 years, Kim would capture thousands of hours of Choe's everyday existence as an artist, footage which would eventually become the documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. All the while, Choe continued his obsessive traveling, from making an expedition to the jungles of the Congo to painting graffiti and murals around the globe alongside the world's greatest urban artists for the street culture brand Upper Playground.
In late 2003, Choe arrived in Tokyo and was jailed within 24 hours. An undercover security guard had approached him threateningly, and due to the language barrier, he misunderstood the man's intentions and reacted instinctively, punching him in the face. Choe ended up spending three months behind bars for violent assault, out of contact with his family or friends, and under threat of being imprisoned for two years. During that time, he suffered greatly from loneliness, anxiety and a lack of access to art materials. With small pieces of paper and the one pen his cell was allowed, he made over 600 drawings during that period, including portraits of his Japanese cellmates which he used to distract them from beating him up. In his desperation, he also executed a series of erotic paintings using soy sauce, tea, blood and urine for color. After three months, he was released on the condition that he leave Japan immediately and not return. His prison art has been the subject of constant speculation and interest ever since.
Returning home to San Jose
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...
with a new perspective on life, Choe began the task of rebuilding himself from the ground up, focusing hard on his career and channeling his more self-destructive impulses into somewhat less risky pursuits such as gambling and drumming. Burying himself in work, he accepted mural commissions from Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss
Heidi Fleiss
Heidi Lynne Fleiss is an American former madam, and also a columnist and television personality regularly featured in the 1990s in American media. She is often referred to as the "Hollywood Madam"....
and from the founders of Facebook, among others. After holding several solo shows in San Jose and San Francisco, he was offered a solo exhibit at the Santa Rosa
Santa Rosa, California
Santa Rosa is the county seat of Sonoma County, California, United States. The 2010 census reported a population of 167,815. Santa Rosa is the largest city in California's Wine Country and fifth largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, after San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont and 26th...
Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. He held his first New York solo exhibit, "Gardeners of Eden," in 2007 at Jonathan Levine Gallery in Chelsea, and in 2008, he had his first UK solo exhibition, "Murderous Heart," in both the London and Newcastle locations of Lazarides Gallery, simultaneously.
Having become accustomed to living under the constant eye of Harry Kim's camera, it was a natural next step for him to allow a reality-style film crew to accompany him on some of his adventures. For a web series called Thumbs Up!, which has so far run for three seasons, Choe and Harry Kim were filmed hitch-hiking and freight-hopping from Los Angeles to Miami and Tijuana to Alaska, and then hitching across China from Beijing to Shenzen and the gambling mecca of Macau.
It has often been said that Choe's greatest artwork is his life, itself. As his friend Jason Jaworski explained, "For me, there is no artwork Dave or anyone can create that is capable of completely equalling the vast canvas of Dave's life, which he paints daily while simply living. At the core, there seems to be two types of art, one which allows for escape from one's self, and another which allows for introspection and confrontation with one's self. In either case, I think art's great contribution is when it makes one feel less alone. And if that statement has truth to it, which it does for me, then Dave has created one of the greatest pieces of art by simply living the way he does, which is like no one else."
Over the past 15 years, Choe has built a worldwide reputation for his raw, vibrant, frenetic imagery, exhibiting in galleries in Barcelona, Beijing, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, New York, and many places in between. He says he makes art because he has no other choice. "I don’t know how many times I have to say this—in all honesty and all kidding aside—without art I’d be 110% dead or in jail. I have a murderer’s blood coursing through my veins. I try to be good, but I’m just a bad man who happens to know how to wield a pencil and smear paint in fancy ways."
Work
David Choe's painting process is fast and instinctive, involving building layers of texture wet-on-wet in a wide variety of media, including pencil, ink, crayon, watercolor, acrylic, oil and spraypaint. In 2007, he described his "dirty style" painting aesthetic to Fecal Face webzine, saying, "The dirty styles rule all other schools and styles. The layering, the personal touch to everything. I'm from the school of dirty styles, but it's more than just style and surface, it's every dirty thing that's inside you. Dirty styles is painting on found objects besides a blank piece of paper or a blank white wall. This started for me when my dad would bring home used Xeroxes from work so I could Crayola all over the backs, then I moved on to painting on bus benches and other shit on the street because I couldn't afford canvases... So even before you start, there's some history, there's some spills, chills and marks, then you keep creating more history on top of that, spilling, spraying, dripping, creaming, collaging, making a mess. All this ugly dirty shit, and hopefully the end product being something that's tolerable and beautiful... something born from that filth. Creating hope from dark beginnings... the fucking dirty styles."While Choe's success has largely hinged on his paintings, he has been commissioned to paint murals all over the world, and still paints on the street for his own gratification. As he told Juxtapoz magazine, “I never stopped graffiti. It influences my fine art, with the quickness and immediacy of it. I use oil paint like it’s acrylic, because I can’t wait for it to dry. I love fucking with mediums and seeing how they react to different mediums, but I always considered graffiti separate from my art. I always looked at it as destructive, anarchist, political, spiritual, and mostly just fun. It was a release from being cooped up, hunched over drawing tiny drawings with rapidographs and mechanical pencils. Fuck everything I’m doing at home, I‘m going out late at night to have an affair with the streets. I’m not worried about mistakes, or trying to make shit look right, or fame, or writing a tag over and over—I’m looking to destroy, pure vandalism, and maybe somewhere in between the process I can achieve enlightenment, fulfillment, and redemption, but probably not. You can’t ever really describe the feeling until you’ve stolen two cans of Krylon flat black and hit the streets with reckless abandon. The freedom of speech, and scale of the words and pictures, is humbling.”
Publications
David Choe, Chronicle Books, 2010. ISBN 0811869539.Cursiv, Giant Robot, 2003.
Bruised Fruit: The Art of David Choe, Drips Inc., 2002.
Slow Jams, self-published, 1999.
Other media
Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe, documentary film (2008)Thumbs Up! documentary web series, VBS.TV, (2007–2011)