Formed in 2017, the collective eobchae is an audio-visual production group composed of three artists born in the 1990s — Nahee Kim, Cheonseok Oh, and Hwi Hwang. Through works that traverse the boundaries of various media including video, sound, web, and performance, they weave speculative worldviews by closely examining the rapidly advancing new technologies and environments, focusing on perspectives omitted or erased in these processes.

eobchae is a collective composed of programmer Nahee Kim (b. 1991), audiovisual media artist Hwi Hwang (b. 1992), and in-house producer Cheonseok Oh (b. 1992). Drawing on their individual areas of interest and expertise, the trio has been collaborating on long-term projects.
 
They share a critical perspective on accelerated contemporary media—such as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram—in the post-Internet era, as well as emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence. Each member contributes their technical skills and research to produce collaborative works. 

Nahee Kim conducts research and development of technological components and leads web development, proposing the use of technologies derived from capitalist markets as media and discourse tools. Hwi Hwang produces sound and video, sets the direction of the production, allocates and collects necessary materials, and handles final editing. Cheonseok Oh is responsible for research, scriptwriting, and communication both within and outside the collective.

The artist collective eobchae continues to expand its boundaries by collaborating with professionals and artists from diverse fields, exploring new possibilities for cooperation. For instance, in 2019, they presented the video work CHERRY-GO-ROUND in collaboration with artist Sungsil Ryu. 

CHERRY-GO-ROUND is structured across three temporal dimensions—past, present, and future—within a fictional narrative. It is composed of vlogs by the near-future characters “Cherry Jang” and “Balhaelite1,” along with second-person point-of-view footage. The work adopts the familiar format of contemporary audiovisual media.

The artists focus on fragmented information that drifts across timelines and the private fragments of countless individuals shared in real time through one-person media. Through the work, they capture how the impact of online media—blurring the boundary between virtual and real—produces both action and reaction in our contemporary lives. 

Composed of three fictional episodes, the video reflects a society in which technologies and policies developed to address urgent issues such as the climate crisis fail to lead to fundamental solutions. Instead, entangled with market capitalism, they often drive the world toward opposing outcomes.

eobchae is also working on a long-term project titled ‘Daddy Residency’ (2020–), which centers on Nahee Kim’s body and family planning to imagine a new form of kinship. In this project, Kim plans to conceive a child named “Gaji” through artificial insemination using a donated sperm, with the birth expected in 2026. 

Through an open call, participants are recruited for the ‘Daddy Residency,’ from which selected “Daddies” will join a co-parenting arrangement in the format of an artist residency. According to the eligibility criteria, any adult over the age of 30, regardless of gender, can apply. The selected Daddies will participate in co-raising Gaji with the artist over a three- or six-month residency period.

Centered around Nahee Kim, the ‘Daddy Residency’ project is closely integrated with eobchae’s production practices, branching into multiple speculative worlds. For instance, they developed a TrueView in-stream advertisement using an AI chatbot to recruit Daddies; wrote a security tutorial set in a far future where all reproductive organs are hyperconnected and function as hubs and data packets within a centralized network society; and even created an optimized operating system tailored for Daddies to perform parental roles during their contract period.

Furthermore, eobchae produced Φth Daddy Master Class (2020), a foundational educational program in the format of an online lecture, simulating the political landscape of the future in which Gaji’s descendants might live. Streamed via their YouTube channel, the class presents scenarios in which Gaji’s possible worlds are dystopian, teaching how to identify errors and control variables within those speculative futures. 

The ‘Daddy Residency’ project—through its experiments in conception, childbirth, and co-parenting—offers a vision of a future detached from heteronormative, legal, and institutional definitions of family. Contemporary technologies such as AI machines and artificial insemination serve as tools that help eobchae further articulate their imagination of alternative family structures and caregiving systems.

In their 2022 solo exhibition 《AMAEBCH》 at Museumhead, eobchae presented a video work of the same name (AMAEBCH, 2022), inspired by cryptocurrency. The title combines “AMA,” short for “Ask Me Anything”—a popular content format circulating on social media—with “EBCH,” a crypto-style abbreviation of the collective's name, eobchae. 

The video recontextualizes three previous works created between 2020 and 2022 through multiple perspectives. These timelines converge in the afterlife, where the artist assumes the role of Bishamonten, the ruler of the underworld. In this work, Bishamonten—who appears as the king of the afterlife in the 16th-century novel The Tale of Seol Gongchan (1511)—is reimagined through machine learning and LiDAR sensors, manifesting on screen as a hybrid techno-mythical entity.

Bishamonten, who also serves as the executor of an altcoin, interfaces with mortals through a Q&A format (AMA) centered around cryptocurrency. Even after departing the living world, beings interpret every event in terms of fluctuating values, asking questions that forecast the graph of a fictional cryptocurrency called “eobchae coin.” In response, a voice from the underworld answers. However, due to the emergent nature of machine learning, the exchange gradually devolves into incoherent and contextually disjointed responses.

“eobchae coin” first appeared in the video work The Ones Who Left on Luges (2022), which also serves as the source for AMAEBCH. The video features people speeding down a luge, lying inside it. These individuals, having resisted a state that holds its citizens hostage in exchange for wage labor, have participated in a new currency system where they can claim “eobchae coin” after 60 years of hibernation, receiving a high-value cryptocurrency as a reward.

The act of earning money while sleeping overlaps with the language of today's market, such as the “faint trading method,” where one buys stocks or cryptocurrencies and then “faints” (forgets about them). The path the characters take while riding the luge is steep and precarious, much like the graphs of real cryptocurrencies.  

The luge riders feel physical threats from this speed, with some trying to escape the luge, while others endure the speed, defending their bodies and barely reaching the final destination. Those who arrive at the destination not only seek money but also aim to build a community that believes in the same principles.

The video work eoracle (2022) portrays a community where the eobchae coin circulates as the standard currency. This community is built on the decentralized blockchain network system Web3, where the amount of eobchae coins one holds directly correlates to their right to speak. Within this network, there exists an organization called TrueDAO, made up of oracles who determine the truth of real-world issues through voting and relay the results to the network. 

Among them, the exceptional oracle, eoracle, becomes dissatisfied with the paltry truth-reward system. As a result, they are approached by the underground organization of TrueDAO, called TrueTrueDAO, which offers a risky proposal to secure more eobchae coins. Accepting the proposal, eoracle finds themselves at a crossroads, facing even more dangerous choices in order to secure the votes necessary for their version of the truth.

Web3, a decentralized network that allows for horizontal exchanges, is often hailed as an ideal future in contrast to Web2, a centralized structure where platform companies—referred to as Big Tech—profit from the data we generate in hidden ways.
 
However, eobchae withholds such optimistic judgment, instead maintaining a critical distance as they reflect on the background and the process by which new technologies emerge and establish themselves. They present a cold, rational outlook on the possible futures that might emerge from this process.  

eoracle reflects this perspective, simultaneously showing the hope for a new utopia and the dystopian prelude brought about by individuals’ primal desires to maximize their personal profit within it.

Meanwhile, the new work idempotentia (2025), unveiled at the 《Young Korean Artists 2025》 exhibition currently held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, applies the algorithm used to ensure data consistency and integrity in distributed systems to the attributes of religion. The work begins by drawing a parallel between the process through which raft algorithm nodes in a distributed system reach consensus and how religious groups seek truth through revelation. 

Set in the fictional sacred land of Utah, the work unfolds through an anthology that describes the characters and narratives of six saints. A website is built based on the biographies of the saints, which are structured around birth, persecution, and martyrdom. Images of the saints are reproduced in Wikipedia-style graphics, set against a background reminiscent of a sanctuary and a triptych.

Through the symbolic and metaphorical portrayals of these saints, the piece critically engages with questions about the future of technocracy and hypercapitalism. Their new work also involves contributions from writers and visual artists, sharing the results of this flexible collaboration and solidarity.  

In this way, the work of eobchae maintains a critical perspective on new technologies such as Web3 and blockchain, as well as on hyper-capitalism. It invites us to take a step back and calmly imagine the accelerated present and the future to come. By actively borrowing from media such as social media, which has become deeply integrated into our daily lives, they demonstrate the potential of media aesthetics that bring the speculative worldviews of science fiction into the present.

 ”Who calls themselves avant-garde? What does their so-called avant-garde practice advance? Can we know the direction of rotation inside the wagon wheels? Are the wagon wheels rolling forward? Or the direction toward which they are rolling may be the front.”     (eobchae, Artist’s Note) 

eobchae (Nahee Kim, Cheonseok Oh, Hwi Hwang) is an audio-visual production collective formed in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include 《ROLA ROLLS》 (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2024), 《eoracle》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), and 《AMAEBCH》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2022).
 
They have also participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including 《Young Korean Artists 2025》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2025), 《24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), 《2023 Gwangju Media Art Festival: Flux Unveiled》 (G.MAP, Gwangju, 2023), 《So-Called Normal Family》 (Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, 2023), 《FRIEZE FILM 2022: I Am My Own Other》 (Magjip, Seoul, 2022), and 《The Fable of Net in Earth》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2022). 

In 2021, eobchae won the 12th DOOSAN Yonkang Art Award in the visual arts category.

References

• 업체, eobchae (Artist Website
• 두산연강예술상, 업체eobchae (DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Award, eobchae) 
• 더아트로, 전시장의 영상들 – 업체eobchae 인터뷰, 2023.01.11 
• 백남준아트센터, 업체 eobchae × 류성실 “체리-고-라운드” (Nam June Paik Art Center, eobchae × Sungsil Ryu, “CHERRY-GO-ROUND”)
• 백남준아트센터, Φ번째 대디 마스터 클래스 (Nam June Paik Art Center, Φth Daddy Master Class)
• 수원시립미술관, 《어떤 Norm(all)》 작품 소개 – ‘대디 레지던시’ (Suwon Museum of Art, 《So-Called Normal Family》 Artwork Description – ‘Daddy Residency’) 
• 뮤지엄헤드, AMAEBCH (Museumhead, AMAEBCH) 
• 월간미술, 업체eobchae – “기다, 아니다?” 너는 진실이 뭔지 알겠어? – 조현아 기자 
• 두산아트센터, eoracle (DOOSAN Art Center, eoracle) 
• 국립현대미술관, 젊은 모색 2025 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Young Korean Artists 2025)