Christine Ay Tjoe
- b. 1973 in Bandung, Indonesia
- Working in Bandung, Indonesia
- Showing at Asia Society Museum
- On view October 27, 2020, through February 7, 2021
Christine Ay Tjoe’s practice has its roots in the graphic arts and specifically drypoint etching. The artist received a Faculty of Art and Design degree in printmaking and graphic art from the Bandung Institute of Technology in 1997. While her choice of medium has expanded beyond prints to include drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, the centrality of the line, first seen in her prints, has remained. Ay Tjoe’s scratches, marks, gestures, and strokes—most evident in her two-dimensional works—seem to tap into a personal and primal outpouring of emotion and psychological anxiety.
For the Triennial, Ay Tjoe presents a group of works demonstrating her mastery of line and her ability to evoke emotional intensity through varying the density and thickness of lines. These marks and lines almost seem to resist any sense of formal structure and threaten to break out of their canvas or aluminum containers. The 2018 diptych, Pleasant Breath of The Black, is accompanied by five works of lithographic crayon on aluminum plate, from Always Floating In A Constant Distance, a series of thirteen prints also from 2018. The intimate scale of the works and their cold, stark surfaces accentuate the explosive quality of the artist’s jet-black strokes. This suite of works captures the tensions—between light and dark, presence and absence, and freedom and constraint—that run through Ay Tjoe’s practice. Hovering between pure abstraction and figuration, her works hint at the possibility of violence being ever-present beneath the surfaces of our lives and raise concerns relating to human existence.
Supported in-kind by White Cube.