Chen Chin was born in 1907 in Xiangshan, Hsinchu, into a well-to-do family that, unusually for the time, supported her artistic ambitions. She studied at the Women's Fine Arts School in Tokyo, mastering the meticulous gouache technique of Eastern-style painting. In 1927, at the very first Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition, the twenty-year-old Chen Chin was selected alongside two other young Taiwanese while many established masters were rejected — and the press hailed the trio as 'the three youths of the Taiten.' She was the only woman among them. She went on to have works accepted at Japan's Imperial Exhibition and repeatedly at Taiwan's own shows, painting elegant portraits of women and serene Buddhist figures with exquisite refinement. Her celebrated Bereaved Mother Kannon and her graceful studies of Taiwanese women in traditional dress defined an era of Eastern-style painting on the island. As Taiwan's first professional female painter, she broke open a field long closed to women. Chen Chin painted into old age and died in 1998, her long career bridging the colonial and modern worlds.

• One of 'the three youths of the Taiten' (1927), its only woman

• Taiwan's first professional female painter