eobchae, AMAEBCH, 2022, Single-channel video, 60mins, Installation view of 《AMAEBCH》 (Museumhead, 2022) ©Museuhead

Museumhead will hold a solo exhibition 《AMAEBCH》 by the artist eobchae from May 13 to July 2, 2022. The exhibition title "AMAEBCH," pronounced as "Amaeobchae," combines the abbreviation "AMA" from "Ask Me Anything" - a content format widely circulated on social media - with "EBCH," written in a cryptocurrency-like style. In the new video work of the same title, AMAEBCH, eobchae contextualizes three videos presented between 2020 and 2022 from multiple perspectives, predicting a new possible world.

eobchae, AMAEBCH, 2022, Single-channel video, 60mins, Installation view of 《AMAEBCH》 (Museumhead, 2022) ©Museuhead

eobchae has accelerated the present to preempt the future or relativized the here-and-now from the translucent, fluid perspective of a future observer. To do so, eobchae takes specific conditions of reality and pushes them to an extreme, building a speculative world on the screen and engaging in a playful act of "human-god" interaction. The three video works included in AMAEBCH (2022) are examples of this method. If the scope of eobchae's practice lies in the imagined gap between the present and the future, that gap has been gradually narrowing along with the loss of the world's possibilities. In this situation, the new territory that eobchae has secured is the underworld, and the motif is cryptocurrency.

In AMAEBCH, eobchae converges the timelines of the three video works into one place (the underworld) so that mortal beings of all tenses can encounter one another, then takes on the role of the underworld’s administrator (Bishamonten). The classic character of Bishamonten, the king of the underworld appearing in Seolgongchanjeon, manifests on the screen through the mediation of machine learning and LiDAR sensors. As the executor of altcoins, Bishamonten’s interface with mortals revolves around questions and answers (AMA) concerning cryptocurrency. Even in death, mortals, who reduce the value of all events to the rise and fall of numbers, pose questions predicting the graph of a fictional cryptocurrency - the eobchae coin - to which the voice of the underworld responds. However, due to the machine-learning-based spontaneity of Bishamonten, the Q&A (AMA) increasingly turns into a Zen dialogue. Questions and answers, answers and answers burst forth with clarity, suggesting a possibility to overcome all vulgarity.

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