Christine Ay Tjoe was born in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1973, is widely recognised for her emotionally charged abstractions, rendered through dense accumulations of line and colour. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, Ay Tjoe’s practice navigates psychological and spiritual terrains, exploring the dualities that underpin human experience – light and dark, order and disorder, virtue and vice. Her compositions are distinguished by a dynamic handling of form and space, where expressive mark-making – often in deep ochres, indigos, crimson tones and graphite black – coalesces into complex, shifting structures. Though abstract, her work conveys a visceral emotional register, animated by an inner logic that reflects her engagement with Christian mysticism, religious mythology, and the natural world.
Ay Tjoe’s work is rooted in the cultural heterogeneity of Southeast Asia and shaped by her own biography. Raised in a Christian, ethnically Chinese family within the Muslim-majority context of West Java, she brings to her art a perspective informed by cultural marginality and spiritual introspection. Between 1992 and 1997, she studied graphic design and printmaking at the Bandung Institute of Technology. There, she encountered the work of European draftsmen such as Egon Schiele and Horst Janssen, through the Institute’s exchange programme with the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. These influences are visible in her early print work and continue to inform her sensitivity to line and surface.
After a brief period in fashion and textiles, Ay Tjoe turned to visual art in earnest. In 1999, she began exhibiting regularly, and in 2001, she was recognised as a “Top Five” finalist in the Philip Morris Art Awards at Galeri Nasional Indonesia. Since then, her work has garnered international acclaim and has been exhibited widely across Asia, Europe and the United States. In 2018, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, mounted a major retrospective of her work. She was awarded the Asia Arts Game Changer Award by Asia Society in 2019. Notable group exhibitions include the Asia Society Triennial, New York (2020); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2012); Singapore Art Museum (2012); Fondazione Claudio Buziol, Venice (2011); Saatchi Gallery, London (2011); Shanghai Contemporary (2010); National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta (2009); Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); and the 1st Beijing International Art Biennale, China National Museum of Fine Art. Ay Tjoe continues to live and work in Bandung.