Daing

Acrylic

24 x 24 inches framed

2024

Daing is a wordplay on "daing" (dried fish), "daing" (a grievance, complaint, or a feeling of grief or suffering), and "dying" (dead in a poetic sense of misery). I came up with this idea when walking in the middle of the day and spotted several people sweeping the streets, selling food, and doing their jobs under the hot sun. And then I realized that "Daing" (dried fish) isn't the only thing that gets stinky, dried up, and completely blasted by the sun's heat every day; it's also the people who work hard in the sun. To represent the similarities, I painted the fish eye as a human eye.