Christine Ay Tjoe

Christine Ay Tjoe works from Bandung, Indonesia, making paintings, drawings, and drypoint etchings that pull from the recesses of intuition and feeling. The vocabulary is graphic — mark-making, smudging, deliberate color — and the process is immersive, often undertaken in periods of intense concentration she describes as near-transcendental.

The work mines personal emotion to arrive at something universally resonant. Human life, she says, will forever be the main focus. The subjects shift — greed, vulnerability, the body under pressure — but the method stays consistent: drawing as the foundation, painting as the expansion.

She has exhibited widely across Asia, Europe, and the United States, including a first solo show in Germany in 2022 and participation in the Asia Society Triennial. Her studio practice is fundamentally based on drawing, even when the work grows into paint.