Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe(2008)

Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe is a documentary portrait of the Los Angeles artist whose bold, sexually explicit work challenged conventions throughout the early 2000s. Directed by close friend Harry Kim, the film traces Choe's turbulent seven-year arc from 2000 to 2007—charting his manic peaks of commercial triumph and adventure, including an expedition to hunt dinosaurs in the Congo, against devastating personal lows marked by jail time in Japan, depression, and self-destruction. What emerges is less a scandal exposé than a complex meditation on artistic ambition, redemption, and spiritual reckoning. Dirty Hands captures Choe's journey toward an uncertain kind of salvation, balancing the exhilaration of a bad-boy artist's rise with the quieter, harder work of survival and self-discovery.