American and Western collectors might not but be deeply accustomed to Christine Ay Tjoe’s work, however the rising Indonesian artist has garnered important consideration in Asia, the place she is broadly collected and in excessive demand. Regardless of a sluggish market—notably within the ultra-contemporary phase—her public sale costs surged 87 p.c between 2023 and 2024, culminating in file outcomes this 12 months, particularly for her vibrant, tensely dramatic large-scale abstractions. In January, her Lights for the Layer (2011) set a brand new private file at Sotheby’s Singapore, fetching $2.15 million—210 p.c above its low estimate of $693,100 and surpassing her earlier file by $417,300, a 24 p.c enhance. Between July of 2024 and June of 2025, sixteen works bought throughout seven public sale homes in 4 nations, producing a mixed complete of $7 million.
The rise of Indonesian artwork collectors—younger, culturally engaged and more and more influential—has been a key pressure behind Ay Tjoe’s increasing market. Indonesia now boasts one of many strongest artwork markets in Southeast Asia, fueled partially by gotong royong, the nation’s spirit of mutual help. But Ay Tjoe’s attain extends far past her house nation, and her latest solo debut at White Dice in New York unveiled a spellbinding new physique of labor that’s already sparking broader appreciation amongst American and worldwide collectors alike.
Past the record-breaking numbers, standing earlier than Ay Tjoe’s riotous, dramatically gestural abstractions seems like being pulled right into a vortex of emotion and sensation—painted tides swelling into waves in an intense psycho-sensorial battle. Her fleshy abstractions pulse with uncooked emotional vitality, a sanguine palette resonating viscerally with the physique itself: flesh, blood and scattered human matter caught in a flux of evolving sensations and infiltrations that constantly reshape it.
There’s something fluid and organically instinctual in the way in which the red-bleeding tides of her compositions transfer throughout the canvas like magmatic waves of matter and vitality condensed into pigment, settling virtually alchemically into new, evocative varieties. But, as Ay Tjoe explains to Observer after we visited the soon-to-close “Lined and Cowl,” her course of entails the usage of drypoint, so though portray might be extra spontaneous, accomplished any time, drypoint additionally makes it an intensive course of, involving many steps.
Because the artist explains, her use of reds and magentas evokes components of the physique—blood, pores and skin and bone—whereas concurrently alluding to the thought of familial blood ties. “Some components are dry, shiny crimson, like a set of relationships in a household which are wrapped up and organized neatly,” she notes. “With these works, I approached them as having the spirit of ‘volumes,’ slightly than simply shapes or varieties.”
On the identical time, the primacy of gestural pressure—reversed by the artist onto the clean house of the canvas—capabilities each allegorically and sensorially, suggesting a pursuit of catharsis by the act of portray. In confronting intergenerational trauma, Ay Tjoe additionally confronts the function of familial silence in burying, dismissing and concealing battle and ache—silences that inevitably resurface in particular person lives, particularly when one begins to query their true identification and the deepest essence of their existence.
The layering of translucent washes turns into a visible metaphor for the method of grief—revisiting, revising and revoking it—an effort to metabolize loss and finally fortify the self beneath a brand new pores and skin of consciousness. “On this physique of labor, the continuous strategy of protecting and protecting once more is an effort to visualise the issues in my life to be solved,” Ay Tjoe displays. “However it’s by visualizing the issues in my life on the canvas that shapes and pictures come to me. My visible follow provides me private, emotional perception.”
Unaddressed trauma—a silent burden that accumulates beneath the floor of consciousness—is explored right here by paint, because the artist dares to descend into these depths, meticulously excavating layers of reminiscence and story which have been intentionally suppressed, actively forgotten, or passively allowed to fade into the shadows of an omertà born of ache or disgrace. But sooner or later, this buried weight might erupt as an awesome mass of untold truths, revealing a subterranean river of ache and unstated narratives—charged with potent vitality, mendacity dormant till a important juncture.
This emergence might be profoundly disorienting. Silence—generally preserved for generations—is lastly damaged, not by alternative, however by the sheer pressure of trauma’s return. Ay Tjoe channels this rupture by her strategy of layering and protecting, erasing and reviving successive planes of paint. “Within the repeated act of protecting, I inform myself that the issue is turning into much less and fewer,” Ay Tjoe displays. Echoing Seneca, she embraces struggling not as one thing that weakens the soul however tempers and divulges it. “The purpose is to rediscover the constructive worth of being human and establishing respect between oneself and others.”
Immediately, her abstractions reveal themselves as potent amorphous metaphors—each of their presence and of their making—for the enduring energy of previous occasions to form the current. They gesture towards the truth that the human psyche, regardless of its exceptional capability for resilience and adaptation, can not indefinitely comprise the deep impression of unresolved grief and unstated trauma—these handed silently from era to era, typically affecting not solely particular person lives however total communities and populations.
On the identical time, it is very important contemplate how Ay Tjoe’s method to abstraction diverges markedly from Western traditions. She is unafraid to go away white house—an ethereal dimension of move, the place the whole lot stays open and in movement, but additionally an area of silence and denial, the place one thing might have simply been erased or eliminated. Her abstraction is, on this sense, deeply rooted in Jap philosophical and aesthetic ideas. The unfilled house has kind and performance: “leaving clean” turns into an act of evocation, creativeness and meditation on the perpetual move of qi—the “important vitality,” “breath” or “life pressure.”
“Subsequent to those varieties on my canvases are areas of absence, vacancy and I can see the connection between varieties and the empty house beside them as significant on this method,” she explains. As a member of a Chinese language household that values Jap tradition, Ay Tjoe acknowledges the significance of displaying respect and appreciation for one’s household and searching for knowledge from her mother and father. “I ponder about letting go of unanswered questions that trigger battle, and leaving them be.” Grief, emotional restraint, interior turmoil, mortality and the self-discipline of the self all coexist in Ay Tjoe’s abstractions.
Notably, even because the pigment in Ay Tjoe’s work tends to coagulate in plasmatic clusters, there are sometimes tense entanglements of traces seen beneath the floor—traces that information, body, or comprise the directional move of shade. Educated in graphic artwork and printmaking, Ay Tjoe got here to portray solely after years of learning the road. “My work revolve across the line, which I smudge, manipulate and try to regulate as my recollections and feelings are transferred onto the canvas,” she explains, noting that her follow is as sluggish and deliberate as the method of persisting in life itself—accepting the unknown and permitting oneself to be weak.
One can sense, virtually viscerally, the stress between emotional launch and rational containment—a push-pull that echoes the human situation. “The rhythm and contrasts of abstraction are essential components of this discovery,” says Ay Tjoe. On this sense, her follow echoes Jung’s perception that what we repress doesn’t disappear, however slightly at all times returns—transfigured in new symbolic varieties—till it’s confronted.
This dynamic animates the exhibition title “Lined and Cowl,” suggesting a negotiation between concealment and publicity, chaos and management. “I continued to hunt, and generally discover, management within the course of of making these works,” the artist displays. “I see my follow as alternating between estranged combined emotions about dying and the acceptance of it.”
On this physique of labor, the magmatic high quality of Ay Tjoe’s abstraction feels extra visceral—extra blood-like, extra corporeal. In comparison with earlier items, because the artist herself has seen, these works seem intensely rooted within the realities of flesh, infused with a palpable sense of torment, pressure and struggling—each bodily and psychological. Ay Tjoe is probing highly effective feelings and deep-seated psychological fears, reawakening dormant psychosomatic truths with the intention to confront them. “There’s household historical past that continues to be unresolved between me and my late father. I really feel the necessity to preserve what was left unstated as is, now that he has handed,” Ay Tjoe displays, conscious that preserving peace and well-being for the remainder of her household is what issues most.
But the unaddressed and contained grief stays, surfacing solely in symbolically filtered methods, because the irrepressible tides of the unconscious inevitably search their expurgatory launch by paint. In her effort to make sense of the previous, Ay Tjoe chooses to maintain sure issues coated, and to cowl them once more by the metaphorical, oblique language portray permits. She trusts that understanding and acceptance will are available time, and that what stays unresolved will, ultimately, lose its weight.
Ay Tjoe says she at all times finds a particular connection to her work within the second of creation. Every painterly gesture opens up a brand new house that transcends the timed and transitory nature of bodily sensations and human feelings, and permits as an alternative for that honesty and acceptance, the place ideas, emotions and experiences might be acknowledged past the confines of particular person trauma, attuned as an alternative to a extra common order.
Irrespective of how spirited or restlessly turbulent, every of Ay Tjoe’s works appears to hunt, in the long run, a way of concord—a doable reconciliation of pressure and opposites. “What I create remains to be in concord and stability,” she explains. These plasmatic lots constantly coagulate and converge, reworking, evolving and dissolving in tune with their very own inner rhythm.
By protecting, layering and returning repeatedly to the floor, Ay Tjoe finally means that one may arrive at a extra built-in rhythm—a sort of acceptance that even contains battle itself. Her abstraction turns into a language for each expressing and embracing the perpetual cycle between chaos and concord, life and destruction—a mirrored image of the entropic essence of existence itself.
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