On Thursday, 16th July we are opening a new exhibition titled “10-Body Problem” at TYPA Gallery. This exhibition is hosted by TYPAs residency artist, Doi Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea). She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores through fictional landscapes conceived based on the anatomical features and biological traits of various organisms.
Borrowing its title from the “N-body problem” in physics, 10-Body Problem explores how images move between past and future, memory and oblivion, fact and imagination. Through the works composed of historical images, imagined landscapes derived from them, and visible-light spectra, the series asks how media and records shape our understanding of the world through the lens of printmaking, a medium of producing records.
In the ancient Eastern mythological text Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a fish with one head and ten bodies may have originated from a simple misreading: people in ancient times mistook a squid’s tentacles for multiple bodies. Rather than discard this cognitive mistake as false, they recorded and preserved it, allowing it to become a legitimate “alternative truth.” As the historian Paul Veyne suggests, *humans inhabit both the room of reality and the room of myth; from ancient times, the layers of truth recorded through media could be trusted in their own right. Humanity has lived by refracting such errors of perception—its own truths—like a spectrum. Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut The Rhinoceros, though inaccurate to the real animal, circulated so persuasively as an image that it was accepted as fact within the natural sciences of its time.
Developed during a residency at the TYPA Center in Estonia, an institution dedicated to preserving the history of printing and letterpress equipment, 10-Body Problem reflects on images that formed the perception of the world through systems of recording, printing, and archiving. Works made with materials and techniques that bear traces of time from ancient, medieval, and contemporary eras—hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper), etching, and 3D-printed relief plates—become portals through which truth and memory travel across time and space. In an age of fabricated information, post-truth, and rapidly changing futures, I ask: What are our imaginations, or alternative truths? And what kinds of time and space do analog recording mediums and archives create in our present time?
TYPA gallery is open from Wed-Sun, 12.00-18.00. The exhibition will stay open until 31st of July 2026.
TYPA gallery is located Kastani 48f.