600 kinds of dogs? Pet illustrator Lili Chin aims to capture them all in whimsical drawings
Illustrator Lili Chin became fascinated with dog behavior in 2008 after her Boston terrier, Boogie, bit their landlord and they almost got evicted.
Ordered by her landlord to get training for Boogie or else, Chin sought out animal behaviorists. Soon, she was using her drawing skills to collaborate with them on posters and pamphlets aimed at helping pet parents better understand their dogs and cats by reading their body language.
That ultimately led Chin to write the books 'Doggie Language' (2020) and 'Kitty Language' (2023). With whimsical illustrations that drew on her animation experience, she interpreted signs of distress, irritation, content or excitement in body movements such as a wagging tail or flattened ears.
The books have proved so popular that some pet trainers recommend them to clients to help make sense of a pet's difficult behavior. Chin offers free downloads of certain infographics for noncommercial use.
Coming out this week, Chin's third book, 'Dogs of the World: A Gallery of Pups from Purebreds to Mutts," is an ambitious attempt to introduce and illustrate every type of dog around the globe — more than 600 by her count.
It is one in a slew of new books about pets, many with charming illustrations that make them especially accessible. The recent 'Medieval Cats,' for instance, by Catherine Nappington, features funny cat poems, sayings and drawings from the Middle Ages. 'Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats,' due out this fall, pulls together poems, musings and sketches by the science fiction writer, who died in 2018.
Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and two cats, Mambo and Shimmy, Chin said 'Dogs of the World' was her most daunting project yet.
'I'm counting on pet owners to be interested and would be happy to get non-pet owners interested as well,' she said. 'Even if we don't have a dog, we are in contact with them all the time. People looking to adopt can also learn a lot.'
A survey of the world's pups
Chin starts with drawings of nearly 400 officially recognized breeds, including better-known ones like golden retrievers, border collies, German shepherds, various terriers and poodles.
She also introduces readers to more obscure breeds: Venezuela's official dog, the large, rugged Mucuchies; Lapponian herders; muscular white Rajapalayam, or ghost hounds, from southern India; Thai ridgebacks that are hard to find outside of Thailand; hairless Peruvian Inca orchids.
And she describes other groupings of dogs, such as those that live in communities without a specific person caring for them. She argues that these dogs are not strays because the communities watch over them, often feeding them and even giving them names.
Those community animals include so-called 'rez dogs' that roam the tribal reservations in the U.S., free-ranging street dogs that live inside the Moscow metro and have learned to ride the trains, and various kinds of Asian, North African and European village dogs.
Chin mentions the dogs of Chernobyl that barely survived after the 1986 disaster because they were fed by workers visiting the exclusion zone. She even illustrates dingos from her native Australia, and the New Guinea singing dog from Papua New Guinea, a primitive local breed that lives in nearly feral conditions in highland forests.
Communication between humans and their companions
Animal behavior consultant Emily Strong, who Chin consulted on 'Dogs of the World,' praised "her ability to pack an impressive amount of information into a few succinct words and simple but beautiful illustrations -- making complex topics easily digestible.'
'She has such an incredible way of clearly communicating body language signals through illustration,' said Strong.
One of Chin's earliest illustration clients was the late Dr. Sophia Yin, a veterinarian and renowned animal behaviorist who developed a training method known as 'low stress handling' to reduce fear, anxiety and stress in pet patients.
Through Yin and other behaviorists, Chin said, she came to embrace training methods that focus on food rewards and reject ideas around dominance, correction and punitive methods.
'There is so much misinformation and so many enduring myths around dog behavior and dog breeds,' Chin said. 'What I hope my work does is help offer clarity on these topics.'
___
Anita Snow, a former Associated Press staff writer and editor, lives in Tucson, Arizona, and has a German shepherd-husky mix, Shelby. Her work can be seen at anitasnow.com.
___
For more AP stories about pets, go to https://apnews.com/hub/pets.
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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
There's more to Korean music than K-Pop. Young composers show how in L.A. Phil's Seoul Festival
K-pop. Oscar-celebrated cinema. Samsung in the living room. Political urgency in the press. However prominent Korean culture seems to be, there is surprising lack of coverage of the classical scene at large. Already at 21, Yunchan Lim, winner of the 2018 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has reached superstar status. Myung-Whun Chung, whose conducting career began as an assistant to Carlo Maria Giulini at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1977, was just selected, over a veteran Italian conductor, to head La Scala in Milan with the blessing of Italy's nationalist president, Giorgia Meloni. And now the L.A. Phil has turned to the South Korean capital for an eight-day Seoul Festival as a follow-up to its revelatory Reykjavik and Mexico City festivals. Unsuk Chin, today's best-known Korean composer, is the curator. She is, in fact, today's only Korean composer who's well known internationally. Despite a seeming wealth of renowned performers, Korea remains a musically mysterious land. Most of what happens, even now, in Seoul's classical music scene doesn't roam far from Seoul. The mostly youngish composers and performers in the first L.A. Phil festival event, an exceptional Green Umbrella concert of new music at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, were all discoveries. Korean music is a discovery for much of the world. But California does have a head start. Chin, whose music has a visceral immediacy, has long fit in to L.A., championed by Kent Nagano at Los Angeles Opera and by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and Susanna Mälkki at the L.A. Phil. Moreover, ancient Korean court music and its instruments became an obsession with the echt-California composer Lou Harrison. Its noble gentility has been subtly adding to the DNA of the California sound. Only two Korean composers before Chin have made an indelible impression on the world stage, and both, as is Chin, became avant-gardist emigres. As outsiders, they have striking relevance. Isang Yun ((1917–1995) had a shocking career. A brilliant pioneering composer who melded traditional Asian music with contemporary techniques, Yun had been briefly arrested for his participation in the Korean independence movement of the early 1940s. He fled to West Germany, where he became a prominent composer before being kidnapped and returned to Korea. Imprisoned, tortured and threatened with a death sentence, he was eventually freed thanks to pressure from a consortium of internationally influential musicians (Igor Stravinsky, György Ligeti and Herbert von Karajan among them) and returned to West Berlin. And then there was Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Though famed for having been the first major video artist, Paik was a classically trained pianist and composer who began his career following in Schoenberg's footsteps by writing 12-tone music. His route to video was an erratic one that began when he fell under the spell of John Cage and became one of the more outrageous members of the anarchic Fluxus art and performance movement. I once asked Paik, who taught briefly at CalArts when it opened, about whether he always considered himself a composer. He said only a yuppie — 'you know, those people who work in a bank during the day and only go to concerts at night' — would think he wasn't. The Yun and Paik zeitgeist of going your own original and expressive sonic way while always being aware of tradition, whether embraced or rejected, pervades Chin, 63, and the generation of Korean composers who came after her and whom she has invited to the festival. Chin herself left Seoul to study with Ligeti in Europe. The Hungarian composer's music, thanks to Salonen's advocacy, is also in the L.A. blood. The orchestra has, of course, had a Ligeti festival. For the Green Umbrella concert, Chin revealed a great range of approaches among the four exceedingly interesting next-generation composers. She also invited a dazzling array of soloists specializing in Western and Korean instruments as well as the magnificent Ensemble TIMF, which joined the L.A. Phil New Music Group. All were making debuts alongside the luminous and poetic young conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi. In the four pieces (each about 15 minutes), Korean, European and American traditions can serve as sources for reinvention. Juri Seo's Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, given a dashing performance by pianist HieYon Choi, consists of short movements that include a jazz fughetta and Schumann-esque romanticism. Sun-Young Pahg's austerely formal 'L'autre moitié de Silence' for daegeum and ensemble featured Hong Yoo as soloist bending notes and bending time on the bamboo flute used in Korean folk and traditional music. In Yie-Eun Chun's spritely Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the L.A. Phil for the festival, scale-like passages got the Paganini treatment from soloist SooBeen Lee. Dongjin Bae's 'reflective — silky and rough' for standard western flute and spacey strings, another L.A. Phil commission, had an ancient feel with its silences and breathy solos played with enthralling focus by Yubeen Kim. Chin's 'Gougalon (Scenes From a Street Theater),' which ended the program, is a riotous evocation of Hong Kong. Rather than musically reproduce street sounds and people sounds, Chin transforms them into spectacular orchestral chatter. The effect is what their joy must sound like, what their meals must sound like, what their walking and talking and laughing and crying must sound like in a language you don't understand because exhilaration isn't language. All of this is music by distinct personalities, each striving for something sonically personal. Musically mixing East and West dispenses with regulations when crossing borders and becomes an an act of individuality and often resistance. Chun's do-re-me scales become cockeyed before you grasp what's happening. Bae's silky flute, when rough underneath, evoke the feeling you might get when taking a break from Bach an instant before the world's most compelling composer overtakes your own senses. The conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi favors transparency and sensuality at the same time with expressive gestures that seem to magically mold sound. Each piece had different instrumental combinations involving both L.A. Phil and TIMF players. Everything worked. The festival continues with weekend orchestra concerts featuring different mixes of four more new Korean scores commissioned by the L.A. Phil, Chin's 2014 Clarinet Concerto and a pair of Brahms concertos. A chamber music concert with works by Schumann and Brahms played by Korean musicians is the closing event Tuesday. Meanwhile, for a better idea of what Unsuk Chin is up to, last month in Hamburg Kent Nagano conducted the premiere of her new opera, 'The Dark Side of the Moon.' It is a philosophical reflection on the relationship between quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung that profoundly reflects how ideas and traditions interact. It can be watched on YouTube.
Boston Globe
12-05-2025
- Boston Globe
Catching up with NBC Sports Boston's Abby Chin on women in sports, her new podcast, and more
Chin had been in the business for more than a decade and had grown used to being in the minority as a woman in a male-dominated industry. But something about that day in particular felt like a call to action. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'From that moment on, I felt like it was really important to try and do what I can to foster more women in the business, and try to help and do whatever I can,' she said. Advertisement She joined a mentorship committee at She also was inspired to begin work on her latest project, a podcast called ' Advertisement 'This job can be really intimidating, and you have to have a really strong support system to get through those early stages,' Chin said. 'That's what inspired the podcast.' Chin and Funayama began releasing episodes in March to align with Their conversations are casual and wide-ranging, but center on their experiences as women in the industry. Chin's main goal is to celebrate her fellow reporters' accomplishments, but she also hopes to bring attention to the challenges women face in the industry. 'You so rarely see and hear about them,' Chin said. '[This job is] different for women. There are just so many things that men don't have to think about.' Related : Before each appearance, Chin performs an extensive hair and makeup routine because it's what viewers expect from her. She doesn't like getting her nails done, but always has a perfect manicure because it's visible when she's holding a microphone. She has to plan her outfits around her menstrual cycle, and she always carries around multiple pairs of shoes at varying heel heights. Chin also has two young children, Mabel and Silas, After her first pregnancy, she reached out to human resources to see if she could expense the cost of shipping breastmilk back home to Boston while on the road. They didn't immediately have an answer because no one had ever asked. Advertisement 'People want to help,' she said. 'You have to tell them how or ask for what you need. And I think that's hard for a lot of women to do, especially a lot of women in a male-dominated field, because you don't want to be considered a liability, or someone who is lesser than or weaker than, or needs more help.' That was one of the lessons she sought to impart on her students at Boston University this spring, where she taught a broadcast journalism class to a group of 15 seniors. Half of her students were women. 'That's part of why I wanted to teach, is to kind of try and bring down those barriers,' Chin said. During the semester, Chin brought the class to a BU men's basketball game to observe the production room. Only upon arrival did she realize the entire crew — the director, technical director, and tape operator — were women, giving her students a glimpse of what their futures could look like. 'I feel like you don't know it's possible,' Chin said, 'until you can actually talk to someone who's done it before.' Emma Healy can be reached at
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Yahoo
600 kinds of dogs? Pet illustrator Lili Chin aims to capture them all in whimsical drawings
Illustrator Lili Chin became fascinated with dog behavior in 2008 after her Boston terrier, Boogie, bit their landlord and they almost got evicted. Ordered by her landlord to get training for Boogie or else, Chin sought out animal behaviorists. Soon, she was using her drawing skills to collaborate with them on posters and pamphlets aimed at helping pet parents better understand their dogs and cats by reading their body language. That ultimately led Chin to write the books 'Doggie Language' (2020) and 'Kitty Language' (2023). With whimsical illustrations that drew on her animation experience, she interpreted signs of distress, irritation, content or excitement in body movements such as a wagging tail or flattened ears. The books have proved so popular that some pet trainers recommend them to clients to help make sense of a pet's difficult behavior. Chin offers free downloads of certain infographics for noncommercial use. Coming out this week, Chin's third book, 'Dogs of the World: A Gallery of Pups from Purebreds to Mutts," is an ambitious attempt to introduce and illustrate every type of dog around the globe — more than 600 by her count. It is one in a slew of new books about pets, many with charming illustrations that make them especially accessible. The recent 'Medieval Cats,' for instance, by Catherine Nappington, features funny cat poems, sayings and drawings from the Middle Ages. 'Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats,' due out this fall, pulls together poems, musings and sketches by the science fiction writer, who died in 2018. Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and two cats, Mambo and Shimmy, Chin said 'Dogs of the World' was her most daunting project yet. 'I'm counting on pet owners to be interested and would be happy to get non-pet owners interested as well,' she said. 'Even if we don't have a dog, we are in contact with them all the time. People looking to adopt can also learn a lot.' A survey of the world's pups Chin starts with drawings of nearly 400 officially recognized breeds, including better-known ones like golden retrievers, border collies, German shepherds, various terriers and poodles. She also introduces readers to more obscure breeds: Venezuela's official dog, the large, rugged Mucuchies; Lapponian herders; muscular white Rajapalayam, or ghost hounds, from southern India; Thai ridgebacks that are hard to find outside of Thailand; hairless Peruvian Inca orchids. And she describes other groupings of dogs, such as those that live in communities without a specific person caring for them. She argues that these dogs are not strays because the communities watch over them, often feeding them and even giving them names. Those community animals include so-called 'rez dogs' that roam the tribal reservations in the U.S., free-ranging street dogs that live inside the Moscow metro and have learned to ride the trains, and various kinds of Asian, North African and European village dogs. Chin mentions the dogs of Chernobyl that barely survived after the 1986 disaster because they were fed by workers visiting the exclusion zone. She even illustrates dingos from her native Australia, and the New Guinea singing dog from Papua New Guinea, a primitive local breed that lives in nearly feral conditions in highland forests. Communication between humans and their companions Animal behavior consultant Emily Strong, who Chin consulted on 'Dogs of the World,' praised "her ability to pack an impressive amount of information into a few succinct words and simple but beautiful illustrations -- making complex topics easily digestible.' 'She has such an incredible way of clearly communicating body language signals through illustration,' said Strong. One of Chin's earliest illustration clients was the late Dr. Sophia Yin, a veterinarian and renowned animal behaviorist who developed a training method known as 'low stress handling' to reduce fear, anxiety and stress in pet patients. Through Yin and other behaviorists, Chin said, she came to embrace training methods that focus on food rewards and reject ideas around dominance, correction and punitive methods. 'There is so much misinformation and so many enduring myths around dog behavior and dog breeds,' Chin said. 'What I hope my work does is help offer clarity on these topics.' ___ Anita Snow, a former Associated Press staff writer and editor, lives in Tucson, Arizona, and has a German shepherd-husky mix, Shelby. Her work can be seen at ___ For more AP stories about pets, go to
