The artist David Choe first became known for his graffiti in the streets of Los Angeles, where he painted edgy, expressionistic murals in a mode he calls “dirty style.” For years, he alternated between living off his art, odd jobs, and money made gambling. He self-published a graphic novel. He illustrated an album cover for a collaboration between Linkin Park and Jay-Z. In 2005, when Facebook was still in its infancy, Sean Parker, the company’s first president and a longtime admirer of Choe’s work, invited the artist to paint murals in the company’s offices. Choe accepted payment in stock; when Facebook went public, in 2012, the value of those shares reportedly hit two hundred million dollars.
Choe, who is now forty-seven, has built his brand on the proposition that art is transgression, and that his transgressions are art. He once did jail time in Japan after punching a security guard at a gallery showing his work. He has painted using his own blood. In 2008, he made a portrait of Barack Obama rumored to contain a secret message that could only be seen using black light; it reportedly hung in the White House for a while. Around this time, Choe hosted three seasons of a Vice video series called “Thumbs Up,” in which he and his buddies hitchhiked around the world. (A sample episode summary from Vice: “Choe rips his pants after pretending to take a shit on the Great Wall of China.”) He has palled around with David Chang and Anthony Bourdain. In an interview with Barbara Walters after Facebook went public, he tagged her crisp white button-down with black spray paint, mourned his newfound loss of privacy, and said to her that “money is meaningless.” In a live chat with Gawker, in 2013, he wrote, “i do not give a fuck. i have no shame,” and “i like to watch things burn to the ground.” That same year, he launched a raunchy podcast called “DVDASA” that he hosted with Asa Akira, an adult-film star. In one episode, in 2014, he described sexually assaulting a massage therapist, a biracial Black woman. He later claimed that he was fabricating the tale and guilty only of “bad storytelling in the style of douche.”
Recently, after Choe appeared in the hit Netflix show “Beef,” clips from that podcast episode resurfaced on social media. (Choe quickly filed copyright claims to try to get them taken down.) The thrust of his response—that his disturbing comments were just part of an act—is deeply characteristic; in some ways, he has built a career on such swerves. By trying on so many identities, he has also cultivated a devoted audience—through his tagging, through his Vice show, and then through his podcast and his social-media channels—keeping his followers attentive, entertained, and sometimes destabilized.
After the onset of the pandemic, Choe débuted a newfound commitment to emotional health, with a fervor that felt familiar. In July of 2020, he made an appearance—his fourth—on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He wore a shirt that he had hand-painted, and he sported long, home-dyed hair and a beard. He talked for nearly four hours about his therapy, his meditation practice, his struggles with addiction; he wept openly discussing Anthony Bourdain’s suicide. A year later, this fresh, New Age Choe launched a self-funded TV show, “The Choe Show,” which aired on FX and Hulu. He shot it partly in his childhood home in Los Angeles, whose rooms he had painted with a kaleidoscope of colors and filled with papier-mâché constructions. The show consisted of interviews with celebrity guests—Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, and Kat Von D all made appearances. Choe painted their portraits on canvas and pressed them to talk about their trauma and their dreams, often dramatizing their responses with his own psychedelic animations. A viewer might reasonably imagine that Choe was searching for answers on his own journey and bringing others along on the way.
In the spring of 2022, Choe’s interest in self-examination took a new turn. He posted to social media an eighty-one-minute audio track about the strange origin story of Munko, a buck-toothed cartoon whale figure that he’d been tagging on walls for decades, since his early days as a graffiti artist.
Millions of years ago, Choe says, a Munko left his herd of identical gray Munkos to go on a quest. He befriended a series of characters who each gave him a red item to wear, and returned home clad in color, only to be eaten alive by a mob of his fellows who did not like his refusal to conform. In memory of the murdered Munko, some kindred cetacean spirits started wearing a red thread: “a beacon of light, of hope, of change, of something different, of creativity.”
For much of the rest of the track, Choe seems to be talking with himself.
“You are amazingly talented and gifted,” he says. “No one in the universe can do what you do.”
“No, I’m not,” he continues. “I’m so petty. I catfish people. I bully people.”
“That’s all in the past,” he says. “Today you uplift. . . . I’m telling you, I see you. And you are enough.”
He published similar posts on Instagram and Twitter. It was his first public invitation to a Discord server called Munko, an online community that would immerse users in an ever-evolving version of Choe’s world.
My friend Steven Carbajal has been a fan of Choe’s art and provocations for more than a decade. He first encountered the artist in 2008, when he watched him paint at a group show in New York City hosted by the London gallery Lazarides. Steven was struck by Choe’s energy and his confidence.
Steven is outwardly unassuming, but, as long as I’ve known him, he’s always craved a challenge. The quirkier and more onerous the undertaking, the better.
In 2016, he entered a contest posted on Instagram by René Redzepi, the avant-garde Danish chef, to re-create a recipe from 1669 titled “To Pickle an Old Fat Goose.” In order to follow the recipe as faithfully as possible, Steven persuaded a farmer upstate to sell him a six-year-old gander, which he slaughtered by hand, plucked, and placed in an earthen pot filled with wine; after sealing the whole thing with bread, he cooked it for six hours and then pickled it for three days. He won the competition, which meant a free meal at Noma, in Copenhagen, then lauded as one of the best restaurants in the world.
By late March, 2022, Steven was between gigs as a location manager in the film industry. He was parenting two school-aged kids while his wife worked out of town for months at a time. After seeing Choe’s posts about Munko, he logged onto Discord. It reminded him of the chat-only bulletin boards popular in the early nineties. Munko, he found, had hundreds of members and was adding new users every day. Steven was intrigued to see that Choe was regularly present in the chat, and he was drawn in by the positive tone of the other fans: “U R ENUF,” participants, known as Munkos, told one another.
As he scrolled, he found that users were choosing fanciful names for themselves, like Mocha Munko or Penny Munko. Steven chose the screen name Pinka, which is what he called his childhood imaginary friend. The Discord server also asked users to choose a color to indicate their level of receptiveness to communication on their profiles: red (“I’m just here to hang out”), yellow (“Ask First”), green (“I’m open for interaction”). Steven chose a white flag, the highest level, meaning “I surrender, I want ‘the full Munko.’ ”
Munko was advertised as a non-fungible-token, or N.F.T., project based on Choe’s art. In a practice common on Discord servers hyping N.F.T. launches, buyers of the tokens were granted access to V.I.P. areas on the server, behind the virtual velvet rope. But Choe’s N.F.T.s had an additional feature: each whale image—a melting Munko, a Munko with a fedora and a microphone—was generated by an algorithm that incorporated the owner’s answers to a questionnaire about their aspirations in life.
At first, Steven maintained a hint of skepticism, having bought into earlier, ill-fated N.F.T. projects. This server, however, seemed to go far beyond N.F.T. trading. Choe invited participants into social experiments, and encouraged them to “surrender” and to share personal fears, failures, and successes in the chat.
