Daieny Chin
Hybrid Body
2023
Acrylic on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Half Gallery

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

“My grandmother and I had a significant language barrier between us, which often left me filling in the blanks of who I thought she was.” Daieny Chin’s paintings are peopled with mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and aunts, reflecting the artist's upbringing in an immigrant matriarchy. Hybrid Body is part of a series of works dedicated to their maternal grandmother. In it, they picture their grandmother wearing a traditional European-American dress paired with a daenggi—a type of ribbon often worn by unmarried Korean women. Both aspects of the costume are brought together in a single coherent form. The sense of unity is underlined by Chin’s emphasis on the figure’s interwoven hands.