Daphne's Daughters

Soo Hyun Lee, Aineki Traverso, Jiatong Yuan

February 19 - March 22, 2025

 

According to Greek mythology, Daphne was a forest nymph who escaped Apollo’s unwanted advances by transforming into a laurel tree. Long immortalized by artistic figures from Ovid to Bernini, this tale of pursuit, rejection, and regeneration is enduringly apt. Throughout the works in Daphne’s Daughters, memories are processed and pacified by their enmeshment with the natural world. In alchemizing their personal and contemporary “Apollos”—from experiences of othering, erasure, gender inequity, and environmental change—Lee, Traverso, and Yuan reinvigorate this tale of female agency and transfiguration. 

 

The myth of Daphne takes center stage in Soo Hyun Lee’s eponymous series. Chronological maps of personal experience, Lee’s panoramic pieces draw upon her own experiences of discrimination, harassment, and self sacrifice. Her paintings and drawings are as ethereal as they are ablaze, balancing layers of levity with layers of collapse. Billowing with shades of teal, aquamarine, and periwinkle, Daphne (2021) features feathered brushstrokes that run wild with animism. Limbs, wings, and branches coalesce in her work, blurring the boundaries between the human, spirit, and natural worlds. 

 

Anchored in memory and in nature, Aineki Traverso’s paintings draw inspiration from poetry, literature, film, and her archive of family photographs. By rendering personal memories, Traverso creates landscapes that are as temporal as they are visual. In pieces such as Del Apocalipsis (2023), figures emerge from an abstract sfumato of burnt sienna, midnight blue, and moss green; layered together, the painting’s smiling face, bodies on horseback, and wild horses connote the passage of time. The coexistence of people and animals, coupled with Traverso’s post-environmentalist approach to rendering them, call to mind the indigenous roots of ecofeminist art practices. 

 

In Jiatong Yuan’s abstract paintings, the artist reflects on her experiences with the patriarchal and capitalistic systems of her homeland. In looking at domestic dwellings as keepers of these systems, Yuan creates uncontrolled environments in which earth’s resources roam freely. In Desire the power, when orange is green (2024), gestural bodies emerge from and into the background. Composed  of swathing pastel brushstrokes, deep-hued drips, fine white linework, and patchwork-style embellishments, these bodies become one with their landscape, untethered to any structures. 

In reflecting upon personal experiences, family histories, and sociopolitical conditions through their connections to nature,  the pieces in Daphne’s Daughters generate a contemporary ecofeminist visual language that exists at the intersection of myth and memory. 

 

For a preview of the exhibition, please email info@meygallery.com.