Daieny Chin
Tortoise and Snake, 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. The mythology carries over into Tortoise and Snake, where the two animals encircle the figure of a girl with ram’s horns–a reference to the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1853 painting, Tête de femme coiffée de cornes de bélier (Woman’s Head with Ram’s Horns), another work that blends mythology with then-contemporary life. “Rams are a symbol of sacrifice in Biblical context,” Chin explains.