Christine Ay Tjoe

Christine Ay Tjoe (born 27 September 1973) is an abstract expressionist painter from Bandung, Indonesia. Ay Tjoe's artwork style is mostly abstract, expressing human emotions and flawed figurative objects by using colors from primarily muted to bright hues. Her art features strong lines, abstracted figurative elements, and a unique brushstroke technique. She has received multiple awards for her work, including the Prudential Eye award in 2015, where she won the Best Emerging Asian Artist Award, and the Asia Arts Game Changer Award in 2019.
Christine Ay Tjoe was born on September 27, 1973, in Bandung, the capital of Indonesia’s West Java province. In 1997, she graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design of the Bandung Institute of Technology, having studied graphic design and printmaking. It was during this time at the Bandung Institute of Technology that Ay Tjoe began to use nature as the 'inspiration' for her artwork, having grown up in an area without much. She started her career in the fashion and textile industry before actively working as an artist, and in 1999 she started exhibiting her work seriously.
Ay Tjoe works in conventional mediums such as painting and printmaking, as well as soft sculptures and large-scale installations. As a graduate of the Bandung Institute of Technology, she studied various art techniques, including intaglio printing and graphic arts. She began her career specializing in printmaking, then later exploring intaglio drypoint prints, woodcuts, and textiles. She only started painting later in her career. During an interview with Studio International, Ay Tjoe stated that "it doesn’t matter what the medium is, as long as the process is drawing. I will always treat every medium as paper and pencil". Having explored various art techniques to express herself on a larger scale, Ay Tjoe transitioned from drypoint on paper to oil bar on canvas, which has now become her signature medium.
Derived from Southeast Asia's cultural diversity and ethnic background, the artist's works explore themes based on Christian narratives and spiritual concepts, emphasizing human imperfections and duality (Janus-faced nature). Faith plays a key motivating factor in Ay Tjoe's art, which she has described as a 'God-given task'. Her works consistently use strong lines, showing flawed figurative objects that are intensely abstracted. She uses brushstroke techniques to present rough to smooth transitions to breaking into harmony. Through layered abstract imagery, Ay Tjoe expresses emotions such as melancholy, struggle, pain, and happiness, depicted from clusters of color throughout the images. She balances positive and negative space and color to illustrate the interconnectivity of humanity and nature.
From 2010 onwards, the color in her paintings gradually shifted from primarily muted and washed-out earth tones to bright hues of rose, pale pink, vermillion, ochre, and rich brown, giving her compositions a more intimate feel. A prime example is in the painting The Curious Hole which depicts a potent sense of a beginning – a delicate interpretation of the exhilaration of birth and the fragility of newborn life – created during a special period when her first child was born.
In the painting The Workers Ay Tjoe uses the intaglio drypoint technique and experiments with line architecture and form to enact each stroke with whimsy and improvisation. For direct engagement with the piece, she uses her hands and rubs the rough lines with her own palms to create a profound mix of color fields. The Workers conveys a sensation of polar opposites between loneliness and joy, most dramatically with black and white compositions. Through this painting, Ay Tjoe describes the significance of teamwork and partnership, the value of love, giving, and working together to create a world of kindness, faith, hope, and love.
While Ay Tjoe's works address many aspects of humanity, each of her solo exhibitions represents her view of the relationship between individuals and the general public at that time.
After her solo in Edwin's Gallery in 2003, Ay Tjoe returned to Jakarta, Indonesia again in 2016 for her fourth solo. Eksekusi Ego, "Ego Execution" in translation, expresses the artist's exploration of the existence of self and questioning the things people take for granted. The series of pencil works "blurs the ego by concealing the faces or identities in the collective of figures that now appear in layered meanings."(Carla Bianpoen) Compared to her previous exhibitions, which mainly focus on individuality, she seems "now desperately trying to comply with society"(Carla Bianpoen), killing one's ego to blend in general.
This artwork won her the first SCMP/Art Futures award in Hong Kong. She used typewriters connected to loudspeakers as interaction tools. Ay Tjoe also addresses the thought that humans can reach another reality only by going beyond or even tearing down the forms of chaotic daily activities. As art critic Hendro Wiyanto comments: "Only by going beyond daily symptoms, perhaps also by destroying its phenomenal forms, can a screen to another reality be discovered. Only by going beyond the chaos, without denying it, can we encounter the cosmos, a cosmos that contains chaos or a chaosmos."
In Ay Tjoe's 2018 exhibition at White Cube, London, she used black as the main feature to represent "the dark potential which all people have." She was inspired by an essay written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about Faust; the story depicts humanity as a whole, encompassing both the positive and negative aspects of body and soul. Through the story, she discovered a particular delve into the darker aspects of human nature. 'The reality is that darkness is part of human nature' Ay Tjoe reasserts the concept of imperfection, and hopes to call upon humans to be independent individuals with good deeds despite humans not being perfect by nature.
Important joint exhibitions
Christine Ay Tjoe's important joint exhibitions took place in several countries, including China, the USA, the UK, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Italy. China National Museum of Fine Art (2003), 1st Beijing International Art Biennale (2003), Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2005) National Gallery, Jakarta (2009) Shanghai Contemporary (2010), Saatchi Gallery, London (2011) Fondazione Claudio Buziol, Venice (2011), Singapore Art Museum (2012), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2012), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017), Asia Society Triennial, New York (2020), Mnuchin Gallery, NY, USA (2023) Joan Mitchell and Christine Ay Tjoe: Two trailblazers of 20th and 21st Century abstraction.
Her contemporary paintings have received high appreciation abroad, especially in Asia. In 2017 her painting entitled Small Flies and Other Wings was sold for HK$11.7 Million by the Phillips auction house in Hong Kong, which placed her works among the most expensive living Indonesian artists. The painting depicts life and death, visualized by a swarm of flies. The prices for paintings of Christine remain high. In 2021, her painting Second Studio from 2013 was sold by Sotheby's for HK$7.4 Million in Hong Kong.