Christine Ay Tjoe’s Silent Supper 06 (2007) is a disquieting and psychologically charged work that forms part of her broader Silent Supper series, in which she explores the nature of eating. Through the series, Ay expresses the tensions between corporeal necessity and spiritual or creative sustenance. Using a hybrid medium of digital print and acrylic paint, Ay creates an unsettling scene that resists straightforward interpretation. To make Silent Supper 06, the artist made digital prints of cloth puppets, which appear humanoid but deliberately lifeless. Arranged in poses of collapse, their bodies are depicted being fed intravenously. Surrounding them are indeterminate forms and dark flecks suggestive of blood, evoking a visceral unease.

At the heart of Silent Supper 06 is Ay confrontation with the act of eating. She has spoken candidly about her personal relationship with food, explaining that the demands of the body often interfered with the clarity and discipline of her creative process. In her words, “there are two different energies in my body; one depends on food and keeps the body alive, the other works the creative sources.” For her, silence – both physical and mental – is essential to sustain the latter. The resulting imagery in Silent Supper 06 is not so much illustrative but intuitive. It is a somatic expression of these conflicting energies rendered in metaphorical form.

Formally, the work is defined by its tension between the digital and the handmade. The digitally printed puppets are overlaid with painterly marks, making it difficult to discern where mechanical reproduction ends and human intervention begins. This deliberate ambiguity deconstructs the surface legibility of the image, requiring the viewer to read not in narrative terms, but in terms of gesture, affect, and association. The aim is not to communicate a prosaic message, but to tap into the viewer’s unconscious through body language, texture, and the emotive charge of colour and composition.

There is a ritualistic, almost sacrificial undertone to Silent Supper 06. The figures, limp and passive, appear subjected to a process beyond their control. They are consumed by a force not unlike the very compulsion to create that Ay describes – a force that nourishes and depletes in equal measure. The intravenous feeding evokes both medical intervention and symbolic communion, positioning the work somewhere between a medical tableau and a spiritual allegory.

Ay’s reference to trees and plant life as models of alternative nourishment is particularly poignant. “Plants do not eat like we do, but they are not dying,” she says. In this statement lies a reverence for forms of life that function without violence, without conscious consumption. The “smooth actions and sophisticated structures” of trees, as she describes them, suggest a purity and autonomy that human bodies struggle to attain. Silent Supper 06 can thus be read not only as a reflection on human fragility, but as a yearning for a different kind of being: one that transcends hunger and silence.

Ay, one of Indonesia’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists, continues to draw from her deeply personal experiences to explore themes of vulnerability, interiority, and the fraught relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Silent Supper 06 renders this inner conflict with unsettling beauty and philosophical depth.