DAIENY CHIN
Olive St.
Artist Reception: March 4th, 6-8 PM
March 4th - April 1st, 2023
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In a 2022 painting “The Sent Down Girl” Daieny Chin depicts her late aunt as a rural Korean peasant holding a baby haetae in her satchel. There is a double fiction at play here. For starters, you almost never see this goat-like mythological creature as a kid and secondly Daieny never met her mother’s sister since she drowned at 23 years old, well before the artist was born.
On some level we all accept the generational narrative of our ancestors however factual the script and with whatever liberties taken. Chin’s new exhibition “Olive St” is largely an homage to her maternal grandmother who lived on this street name in downtown Los Angeles. Each image in the show is like a different prism from the same diamond of her recollections. “Much like code switching, these paintings constantly morph and adapt to the memories that were inspired from my childhood in her care.” says Daieny. “Growing up in the heart of the city, my exposure to nature was limited to the local corner park and urban wildlife that roamed the streets at night. My childhood was often spent in daydreams concerning surrealistic adventures in nature surrounded by coyotes and pinwheels. 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. I’ve always thought of her as a coyote: stoic and wild. An urban animal perceived as untrustworthy and dangerous by Anglo-Americans, despite its cunning intelligence and high ability to adapt to their declining natural habitat. She had a vivacious will to survive and protect her family.”
The artist’s family is a patchwork of different languages and cultures, migrating between three countries (Korea, Brazil and America) over three generations. Her grandmother viewed America as the pinnacle of dreams and salvation. Pinwheels in the paintings are meant to represent a nostalgic relic of the American nuclear family. Daieny’s grandmother had a pinwheel in her garden pot; her 14th story balcony compensated for the lack of suburban grass lawn with the freshly painted white fences we see in films. A harsh contrast to the reality of living in a government-assisted apartment. But the extended family found ways of bringing about their own Garden of Eden from street vendors scattered around downtown. Soon their apartment filled with tales of mountainous terrains and coastal plains the grandmother once called home back in Korea and Brazil. As William Faulkner once reminded us “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
