Chen Jin

TAIWAN, Hsinchu

Chen Jin, also known as Chen Chin, was a painter born into a literary family. Her medium of choice was gouache, which she learned to use from her Japanese fine arts teacher, Gobara Koto. In 1925, she went to Japan and was admitted to the University of Art in Tokyo. There, Chen majored in gouache painting but also studied figure drawing, landscape painting, calligraphy, and the history of fine arts. After graduating, she joined Kaburagi Kiyokata’s School of Painting and learned from his disciples Ito Shinsui and Yamakawa Shuho.
In 1927, three of her paintings, Poppy, Posture, and Sunrise, were chosen to be exhibited in the first Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition. Chen, alongside Lin Yu-Shan and Kuo Hsueh-Hu, was considered one of the Three Young Artists of the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition. She had multiple paintings selected for the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition and Taiwan Governmental Fine Arts Exhibition.
The majority of Chen’s paintings focused on women in daily life, indoor furnishings, flowers, and trees. Her painting style was elegant, delicate, realistic, and feminine. Her collection of paintings, Life of the Buddha, is kept at the Great Hero Hall of Faguang Temple. However, three of the original ten paintings are missing. Another painting of Chen’s, Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, is retained at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung.