Artist David Choe on The Choe Show - FX — Artist David Choe on *The Choe Show* - FX

By Interlocutor Magazine

“Everything I do now is in the spirit of giving back,” the artist David Choe says in The Choe Show, his uncategorizable limited series from FX and now streaming on Hulu. The program is a bouillabaisse stew of television: a mix of talk show, costumed role-playing therapy sessions, deeply personal confessionals, and performance art. Above all, it’s a wildly eclectic exercise in ecstatic compassion from one of contemporary art’s most polarizing and unpredictable figures.

Choe chats one-on-one with figures both famous (actors Will Arnett, Rainn Wilson, Val Kilmer) and lesser famous (tattoo artist Kat Von D, cholo goth originator Rafael Reyes, porn star Asa Akira, rapper Denzel Curry, Steve-O from Jackass, and the writers Erica Garza and Neil Strauss). Choe often converses with his guests while both are seated in wheelchairs and wearing colorful floral-printed shirts. Most of the talks are shot within the confines of Choe’s paint-splattered childhood home in Los Angeles, which he bought in order to reclaim it from what he has described as a psychologically abusive upbringing by extremely religious parents (exorcisms were performed in the living room, he often watched his parents fight in the kitchen, and upstairs is “probably where I was conceived”). “I’m gonna take it back and I’m gonna change the energy of the place,” he says, and he accomplishes this in spades by turning the entire home into a colorful playhouse-like refuge.

While coaxing his guests to open up about very personal and painful topics, Choe paints their portrait, even though he admits early on that he hates doing portraits. Choe became famous in 2012 for earning more than $200 million from Facebook stocks that he took in lieu of cash payment for painting murals in their first offices back in 2005. Before and after that windfall, he was an admitted out-of-control sex, porn, and gambling addict. He has said that he was “done with life and chasing a bottom.” But the man seen in The Choe Show appears to have dramatically recovered from impulsive self destruction after thousands of hours of therapy. He now has a much more buoyant outlook. His return from the brink has instilled a sense of genuine openness and compassion that encourages his guests to open up equally about their own deeper struggles, and the results are often cathartic and moving.

David Choe and Asa Akira on The Choe Show - FX — David Choe and Asa Akira on *The Choe Show* - FX

The harrowing personal struggles talked about by both Choe and his guests are frequently dramatized with a variety of illustrated and stop-motion animation sequences, interspersed with numerous grainy VHS home video clips shot by a younger Choe and his friends clowning around during his teenage years and throughout his time living a delinquent life. “I knew I would never make any money doing art, and I would just shoplift and steal and do weird shit for the rest of my life to make money,” he tells one of his guests. In 2005, he spent two months in a Japanese jail for assaulting a security guard at an art show he was participating in, and that wasn’t his only time getting in trouble with the law. All of this behavior was rooted in deep trauma. As a child, he was sent away to live with relatives in South Korea because they couldn’t afford to care for him in the U.S. He believes he was sexually abused there, and the experience also instilled deep abandonment issues within him, along with a notion that there was little point of being “good.” “When I act like an asshole, what do I get?” he says. “I get rewarded.”

David Choe and Denzel Curry on The Choe Show - FX — David Choe and Denzel Curry on *The Choe Show -* FX

Will Arnett on The Choe Show - FX — Will Arnett on *The Choe Show* - FX

But now at age forty-five and with a new baby on the way, Choe doesn’t take his success or the people he is close to in his life for granted. The Choe Show is in many ways a beautiful expression of personal reckoning and gratitude. Anyone watching it couldn’t help but reflect on their own life and decisions. The Choe Show may even be Choe’s greatest artistic accomplishment to date. It’s a rich summation of what brought him to where is now, and it’s also a demarcation point of what’s ahead for him in both his personal life and artistic career. It’s a singular viewing experience of vibrant soulfulness.

The Choe Show is currently available to watch on FX and Hulu

Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.