White Cube presents: Christine Ay Tjoe solo exhibition

White Cube is pleased to present Christine Ay Tjoe’s (b. 1973 Bandung, Indonesia) first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong 2021. One of Indonesia’s most prominent female contemporary artists, Ay Tjoe’s work focuses on the human condition and addresses themes of philosophy and spirituality. Beginning her career as a graphic artist focusing on the intaglio dry point technique, the artist’s oeuvre has evolved into painting, sculpture and installation.

Ay Tjoe’s third exhibition with the gallery features a new series of paintings made in response to the pandemic and its impact on the artist’s everyday life and activities. For Ay Tjoe, painting became a way of processing and intuitively responding to the elementary needs that make us human, demonstrating that growth is possible in the most challenging times.

Produced during a period of intense concentration, almost akin to a transcendental state, Ay Tjoe’s dramatic, layered paintings include tentative suggestions of figurative or animal forms within intense passages of abstraction, often with large areas of the canvas left blank. Tactile, thick impasto alternates with watery glazes and washes of colour which, when combined with a highly expressive line, results in works that can appear both powerful and spectral, as if disappearing into or emerging from the material of the canvas itself.