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Descriptif du lot
'Most of the time, when I want to make a new series of work, I look at the blank and empty canvas and, based on my experiences, the painting just flows out. It’s like I find a spirit, and the spirit helps me make it.' – Christine Ay Tjoe
Christine Ay Tjoe is celebrated for her emotionally resonant and intensely expressive paintings. Drawing in part on her religious background, she examines themes of faith, resilience, and human interconnectedness through a deeply personal visual language. Created for her landmark 2016 solo exhibition at White Cube London, The Highest Player 01 belongs to a pivotal period in Ay Tjoe's career. The exhibition made her the first Southeast Asian artist to exhibit with the gallery and introduced her creative vision to an international audience. This period also coincided with growing institutional recognition, with Ay Tjoe's work being included in exhibitions at institutions such as Saatchi Gallery, London, SongEun ArtSpace, Seoul and many others across Asia, Europe, and the United States. As Ay Tjoe's distinctive visual language gained increasing critical attention through major gallery exhibitions, her international fame was further affirmed when one of her works entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and M+ Art Museum, Hong Kong, cementing her position among one of the most recognised contemporary Indonesian artists.
Colours, for Ay Tjoe, are never incidental but deeply symbolic, charged with emotional and spiritual resonance. Reds, ochres, and flesh tones in The Highest Player 01 pulse like living organisms, while translucent washes evoke breath and impermanence. Each hue becomes a vessel for the mind, body, and soul, reflecting her belief in the delicate balance between these realms and drawing the viewer closer to the corporeal.
Set against a restrained ground of muted beige, earthy browns, and scorched blacks gestures cut through – thin, urgent strokes of brighter colour that drift instinctively across the canvas. They appear spontaneous yet carefully orchestrated, gathering into dense clusters before dispersing into quieter passages of the composition. And from within, a faint hand emerges half-formed, reaching out as if it’s grasping for something beyond the canvas. Its presence is a tentative human intrusion within the abstract field.
Layers of pigment repeatedly being rubbed back, smudged, and scratched into, allowing earlier gestures to remain visible beneath the surface and lending the work remarkable depth and material presence. Like Joan Mitchell, Ay Tjoe creates also by having direct contact with the canvas, physically pressing and dragging oil sticks across the canvas, Ay Tjoe transforms physical gestures into emotional resonance. Each movement becomes an exchange in dialog between artist and medium, turning the surface into a living field of energy where intuition emerges.
This dynamic visual language underpins the conceptual concerns that define The Highest Player 01 – a reflection on the emotional and psychological conditions of contemporary existence. Guided by the natural world as both mirror and metaphor, Ay Tjoe draws from the hidden life of plants – their tangled and unseen root system. In her early prints and drawings, she reimagined these complex networks through animated, densely layered lines that accumulated into organic masses, often rendered in earth tones evocative of soil, volcanic rock, and charred wood. While these works subtly reflected on environmental degradation, they also marked the beginning of her investigation into the expressive potential of line, leading to the development of the distinctive visual language that would come to define her practice. The intertwined roots, with their cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, became a powerful metaphor for the complexities of human existence and relationships, reflecting their fragility, interconnectedness, and continual renewal. In The Highest Player 01 (2016), these formative explorations unfold into a more emotionally charged visual language, reflecting the psychological pressures of contemporary life and the vulnerabilities that lie beneath the surface of human experience. Drawing from deeply personal emotions to illuminate broader aspects of the human condition, Ay Tjoe balances spontaneity and control through a dynamic interplay of line, space, and colour, creating a work that is at once introspective and universally resonant.
Ay Tjoe allows the physical process of painting to become inseparable from her exploration of nature's unseen forces. The canvas absorbs and resists each gesture as organic forms emerge through successive acts of accumulation and erasure, reflecting the continual cycles of growth, decay, and renewal that underpin her practice. In doing so, the work transcends representation, evoking nature as a living process rather than a fixed image. Created at this pivotal moment in her career, The Highest Player 01 encapsulates the expressive language that has come to distinguish Ay Tjoe's approach to contemporary painting, affirming its significance within both her oeuvre and the broader trajectory of Southeast Asian contemporary art.
Christine Ay Tjoe is celebrated for her emotionally resonant and intensely expressive paintings. Drawing in part on her religious background, she examines themes of faith, resilience, and human interconnectedness through a deeply personal visual language. Created for her landmark 2016 solo exhibition at White Cube London, The Highest Player 01 belongs to a pivotal period in Ay Tjoe's career. The exhibition made her the first Southeast Asian artist to exhibit with the gallery and introduced her creative vision to an international audience. This period also coincided with growing institutional recognition, with Ay Tjoe's work being included in exhibitions at institutions such as Saatchi Gallery, London, SongEun ArtSpace, Seoul and many others across Asia, Europe, and the United States. As Ay Tjoe's distinctive visual language gained increasing critical attention through major gallery exhibitions, her international fame was further affirmed when one of her works entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and M+ Art Museum, Hong Kong, cementing her position among one of the most recognised contemporary Indonesian artists.
Colours, for Ay Tjoe, are never incidental but deeply symbolic, charged with emotional and spiritual resonance. Reds, ochres, and flesh tones in The Highest Player 01 pulse like living organisms, while translucent washes evoke breath and impermanence. Each hue becomes a vessel for the mind, body, and soul, reflecting her belief in the delicate balance between these realms and drawing the viewer closer to the corporeal.
Set against a restrained ground of muted beige, earthy browns, and scorched blacks gestures cut through – thin, urgent strokes of brighter colour that drift instinctively across the canvas. They appear spontaneous yet carefully orchestrated, gathering into dense clusters before dispersing into quieter passages of the composition. And from within, a faint hand emerges half-formed, reaching out as if it’s grasping for something beyond the canvas. Its presence is a tentative human intrusion within the abstract field.
Layers of pigment repeatedly being rubbed back, smudged, and scratched into, allowing earlier gestures to remain visible beneath the surface and lending the work remarkable depth and material presence. Like Joan Mitchell, Ay Tjoe creates also by having direct contact with the canvas, physically pressing and dragging oil sticks across the canvas, Ay Tjoe transforms physical gestures into emotional resonance. Each movement becomes an exchange in dialog between artist and medium, turning the surface into a living field of energy where intuition emerges.
This dynamic visual language underpins the conceptual concerns that define The Highest Player 01 – a reflection on the emotional and psychological conditions of contemporary existence. Guided by the natural world as both mirror and metaphor, Ay Tjoe draws from the hidden life of plants – their tangled and unseen root system. In her early prints and drawings, she reimagined these complex networks through animated, densely layered lines that accumulated into organic masses, often rendered in earth tones evocative of soil, volcanic rock, and charred wood. While these works subtly reflected on environmental degradation, they also marked the beginning of her investigation into the expressive potential of line, leading to the development of the distinctive visual language that would come to define her practice. The intertwined roots, with their cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, became a powerful metaphor for the complexities of human existence and relationships, reflecting their fragility, interconnectedness, and continual renewal. In The Highest Player 01 (2016), these formative explorations unfold into a more emotionally charged visual language, reflecting the psychological pressures of contemporary life and the vulnerabilities that lie beneath the surface of human experience. Drawing from deeply personal emotions to illuminate broader aspects of the human condition, Ay Tjoe balances spontaneity and control through a dynamic interplay of line, space, and colour, creating a work that is at once introspective and universally resonant.
Ay Tjoe allows the physical process of painting to become inseparable from her exploration of nature's unseen forces. The canvas absorbs and resists each gesture as organic forms emerge through successive acts of accumulation and erasure, reflecting the continual cycles of growth, decay, and renewal that underpin her practice. In doing so, the work transcends representation, evoking nature as a living process rather than a fixed image. Created at this pivotal moment in her career, The Highest Player 01 encapsulates the expressive language that has come to distinguish Ay Tjoe's approach to contemporary painting, affirming its significance within both her oeuvre and the broader trajectory of Southeast Asian contemporary art.