Epidermis : Bin Koh

The monumental painting before you is a chapter of our collective story. Epidermis articulates a complex narrative of Western culture and the forces shaping our contemporary reality. Inscribed across the gallery walls, this charged landscape questions what happens when culturally inherited icons refuse to remain in the past.

Bin Koh’s practice has long been concerned with the ways in which memory is reinterpreted over the centuries and how these transformations challenge our perception of canonised History. Her work brings memory, myth and technology into a shared framework: approaching it as an unstable systems through which different facets of human experience can be examined. Working through physical and spiritual binaries, Koh explores the dualities between beauty and horror, perversion and malice, love and empathy. 

Epidermis is inspired by Rome’s foundation myth, using the allegory of the Rape of the Sabine Women, reimagined as a living scene caught in an endless cycle. Through gestures of layering paint and scraping graphite, human-demonic figures emerge from the wall surfaces, revealing naked and mutilated bodies with intertwined limbs and painful expressions that insist on being seen. By choosing both drawing and ordinary materials, the artist subverts the mural, a form traditionally used to glorify heroic events, turning it into a tool for condemning the violence it depicts.

The side panels, in turn, emerge from the artist’s reflection on the rapid technological advances that are increasingly shaping our bodies, infiltrating our genetic code and opening up new ways of producing knowledge. The metaphor of the Rape of the Sabine Women is extended here through the creation of an artificial environment that confuses our senses and collapses different chronologies. One striking example is the juxtaposition of Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky, with the Twin Towers, bringing ancient mythology into dialogue with the modern urban landscape.

For the exhibition, the work extends into a poem written by the artist, who approaches language as another agent of memory. The lines take the form of a prayer: a whispered plea for mercy and clemency that also expresses rage and disorientation. As the voice varies between different registers, the narration gradually moves away from the myth towards a more autobiographical tone, transforming the legend, in the end, into material for a personal confession of displacement and estrangement.