Emerging Artist Spotlight

About the Artist

Hayley Chi Hay Chiu (b. 2001) is a Toronto-based, second-generation Chinese Canadian painter. Working primarily in oil, she holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2023). Her practice traces an ongoing journey of becoming and a search for “home,” reimagining personal narratives through fable and fantasy.

Chiu’s work features surreal depictions of the body and its environment, exploring themes of in-betweenness, desire, and inherited cultural imagery. By layering realism with fragmented and overlaid elements, she disrupts the illusion of direct representation, instead creating painterly worlds that reflect the mythologies we construct to find meaning within the everyday. 

Image credit:
Hayley Chi Hay Chiu, What does the cicada know of ice? (detail), 2026. Oil on canvas, 121.92 cm x 152.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.