Meet the Artist
Hayley
Chiu
Drawing and Painting
“My home is where I fall asleep and where I wake; not defined by place, but my being. I’m always where I need to be with what I need to thrive. “Snail’s Home”, or 「蝸居」, explores and celebrates this relationship with the self that gives me a feeling of fullness and satisfaction. Inserting myself in surreal landscapes, realizations of the paths before me and the agency I have over them, I journey slowly, picking up and shedding bits of myself to add and remove from my mobile home and identity.Selecting Chinese sayings I encounter, I paint a self portrait based on each one. Only a few characters long and always fixed in how they are said and written, but their simplicity leaves space for different interpretations, the memories and imagery conjured by them differing for each person. The words become the “home”, and their meaning the “person” that inhabits them.”
Hayley Chiu (b. 2001) is a second-generation Chinese Canadian painter based in Markham and Toronto. She specializes in oil painting and completed her bachelor’s degree in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University.Inspired by the long and diverse history of my culture that I was never fully a part of, I appropriate its imagery and combine them with symbolism from my own life to narrate an existence that transcends time and place. I document the changes that take place within my surroundings and body and the relationship between the two, embracing the self and the changing forms that it will continue to adapt. Combining high realism and overtly overlaid images, I break the illusion that my paintings are direct representations of reality, but one that explores the mythologies we create to add charm in a mundane life.
Drawing and Painting Oil Painting