Daieny Chin
a cat stretches, 2024
Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Filo Sofi Arts

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025.

Growing up in an Evangelical Christian household, Daieny Chin felt a tension between their family’s religious beliefs and the indigenous Korean folktales and myths they heard from their mother. These paintings from their Mythos Unveiled series juxtapose those two ways of understanding the world.
In a cat stretches, the artist’s personal meditation on grief following a miscarriage is illuminated by an item of Christian pop culture (a Precious Moments candle) and accompanied by a Korean vase painted with the mythological figures of snake and tortoise, indicating conflict and also balance, as in the symbol of yin and yang. The objects are close by, but Chin depicts themselves gazing away from them.