An artist’s response to coronavirus: Indonesian Christine Ay Tjoe imagines us dying a temporary death
- Christine Ay Tjoe often paints animalistic creatures, and it is animal behaviour that has inspired her new works depicting humans responding to the pandemic
- She talks about her creative process, the response to her gender and Chinese ethnicity, and why the rising prices paid for her art won’t affect her
Artist Christine Ay Tjoe grew up and continues to live and work in Bandung, in West Java, Indonesia. Born in 1973, she studied printmaking and graphic art at the Bandung Institute of Technology, the country’s top-ranking art school.
Best known for her large, oil-on-canvas paintings with gestural, ephemeral layers that are abstract but suggestive of manlike or animalistic creatures, she has also worked with fabric and dry point etching. She often draws with oil sticks and uses her hands to rub and smear the paint on the canvas. Regardless of the medium, drawing is at the heart of her practice.
Her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “Spinning in the Desert”, opens at White Cube, in Central on Hong Kong Island, on May 18.
The Hong Kong exhibition will show 12 new works representative of your pandemic experiences. How are they different from previous works?