Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. If you haven’t yet succumbed to the mysterious interlacings and emotional depths of Christine Ay Tjoe’s works, it’s because you live on another artistic planet, probably that of dusty antiques and obsolete certainties. In the contemporary Indonesian landscape, this woman reigns as a singular authority whose pictorial language transcends borders with a virtuosity that makes half of the artists of our time jealous.
Born in 1973 in Bandung, Christine Ay Tjoe has evolved from an initial practice of engraving to an abstract expressionist painting that makes her one of the most authentic and sought-after voices in Southeast Asia. I am not talking about a simple passing trend, but a phenomenon whose canvases are snapped up for millions of dollars in Hong Kong. Her work “Small Flies and Other Wings” was sold for the modest sum of 11.7 million Hong Kong dollars in 2017, propelling her among the most highly valued living Indonesian artists [1]. It is no coincidence that collectors snap up her canvases like starving people at a buffet.
What strikes immediately in Ay Tjoe’s work is this permanent dialogue she establishes between the visible and the invisible. Her abstract compositions, with lines sometimes wild, sometimes delicate, become the theater of an exploration of the limits of our perception, where the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty had failed.
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard had already warned us that “space seized by the imagination cannot remain the indifferent space given over to the measurement of geometry” [2]. Ay Tjoe seems to have fully assimilated this lesson, transforming her canvases into poetic spaces where emotions and sensations intertwine. In her works such as “Not Too Far” (2018) or “The Comrade” (2018), organic forms seem to emerge from elsewhere, from an inner space where human consciousness dialogues with living matter.
Bachelard reminds us that “the poetic image is not subject to a push. It is not the echo of a past. It is rather the opposite: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resonates with echoes” [3]. This resonance, I feel it fully in front of Ay Tjoe’s works, where each layer of paint seems to be a temporal stratum, an archaeology of the human soul. The artist does not content herself with representing the world, she reveals its hidden foundations, its buried truths.
Bachelardian phenomenology invites us to consider the image not as a reproduction of the real, but as a creation in its own right. For Ay Tjoe, the canvas becomes this space where the imaginary takes form and substance. “When I see a blank canvas, it’s a trigger and everything that is in my head ends up projected there”, she confides [4]. This creative process, almost mediumistic, echoes the Bachelardian conception of the imagination as the “faculty of deforming the images provided by perception” [5]. Ay Tjoe does not reproduce the world, she reinvents it.
In her series “BLACK, KCALB, BLACK, KCALB” (2018), the artist creates a universe where black becomes the expression of a latent potential, a dark energy present in every human being. This exploration of inner shadows resonates with Bachelard’s thought on shadows as a space for reverie. “Night is not a space. It is a threat of eternity”, he wrote [6]. Ay Tjoe seems to have grasped this ontological dimension of darkness, transforming it into a space for existential exploration.
Bachelard reminds us that “the image is before thought” [7]. This primacy of the image, this immediacy of the aesthetic experience, perfectly characterizes Ay Tjoe’s work. Her canvases are not read, they are lived. They require total immersion, a sensory availability that our hyper-connected era tends to make us lose.
The other interesting dimension of Ay Tjoe’s work resides in her exploration of the human psyche, which naturally leads us to the territories of Jungian psychoanalysis. Carl Gustav Jung, with his conception of archetypes and the collective unconscious, offers a particularly fertile interpretive framework for appreciating the creations of the Indonesian artist.
Jung defined archetypes as “primordial images” inscribed in the collective unconscious of humanity [8]. These universal motifs structure our psyche and our relationship to the world. In Ay Tjoe’s works, particularly in her series “Spinning in the Desert” (2021), one perceives this archetypal dimension: the abstract forms seem to emerge from a common background of humanity, like reminiscences of a forgotten knowledge.
“The human psyche, like the body, represents a collective of activities and functions inherited”, wrote Jung [9]. This idea finds a striking echo in Ay Tjoe’s work, which draws from the depths of being to extract universal truths. Her canvases do not tell individual stories, they reveal fundamental structures of human experience.
The Jungian notion of individuation, this process by which an individual becomes psychologically “individual”, a whole being, also seems to guide Ay Tjoe’s artistic journey. Her early works, more figurative, have gradually given way to more abstract compositions, as if the artist herself were traversing this path towards a deeper and more integrated consciousness of herself.
Jung emphasized the importance of symbols in the process of individuation: “A symbol is always the best possible way to express something unknown” [10]. The forms that unfold in Ay Tjoe’s works function precisely as these symbols, these attempts to give form to the unspeakable. In her engravings on aluminum plates, the marks and lines seem to be the traces of a dialogue with the unconscious.
One of Jung’s most fertile concepts is that of the shadow, this repressed part of our personality that we do not want to recognize. “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is”, he wrote [11]. This exploration of the shadow, of this “potential darkness” that inhabits every human being, constitutes one of the red threads of Ay Tjoe’s work, particularly visible in her series “BLACK, KCALB, BLACK, KCALB”.
The artist herself recognizes this dimension: “I was talking about the potential darkness that exists in each of us, that grows progressively without even realizing it” [12]. This confrontation with our shadow side, Jung considered it necessary for our psychic development. Ay Tjoe seems to share this vision, transforming her canvases into spaces for recognizing and integrating this fundamental duality.
Duality, moreover, is a recurrent theme in Ay Tjoe’s work. Jung saw in human consciousness a fundamentally dual structure, and considered the integration of opposites as one of the ultimate goals of the individuation process. In works such as “The Workers” (2009), Ay Tjoe juxtaposes black and white, creating a visual tension that evokes this inner struggle between the different facets of our being.
Jung wrote that “the encounter with oneself is one of the most disheartening experiences” [13]. This confrontation with our inner truth, with our contradictions and our shadow zones, constitutes the beating heart of Ay Tjoe’s work. Her canvases do not offer us complacent aesthetic escapes, but confront us with the complexity of our condition.
The artist also seems to have integrated the Jungian notion of anima and animus, these feminine and masculine aspects present in every individual. In her compositions, the forms often oscillate between softness and aggressiveness, fluidity and rigidity, as if they embodied this perpetual dance between the masculine and feminine principles that Jung considered essential to our psychic balance.
What truly distinguishes Christine Ay Tjoe in the contemporary artistic landscape is her ability to transcend simplistic dichotomies. Neither totally abstract nor truly figurative, her work is situated in this fertile in-between where the imagination can unfold freely. As Jung wrote, “creativity is seeing what everyone sees and thinking what no one has thought” [14].
Ay Tjoe’s work possesses this rare quality of speaking to us simultaneously on several levels: visceral, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. Her canvases seize this totality of human experience that Jung sought to apprehend through his analytical psychology. They are not objects to be contemplated passively, but invitations to an inner journey.
In her exhibition “Lesser Numerator” (2023), Ay Tjoe explores the relationship between the individual and the community through the prism of mathematical fractions. The numerator, the part that is above the fraction line, represents the individual in his interaction with the larger community, symbolized by the denominator. This mathematical metaphor, which evokes the tension between singularity and belonging, resonates deeply with the Jungian conception of the individual as a microcosm of the collective.
Jung wrote that “personality is the supreme act of courage in the face of existence, and the central question of man has always been how to live beyond mere survival” [15]. This existential quest animates Ay Tjoe’s entire work, whose canvases can be seen as so many attempts to transcend the limits of our condition.
This ascent towards a broader consciousness, this integration of the different aspects of our being, Jung considered it the ultimate goal of human existence. “Becoming oneself is a journey that lasts a lifetime”, he wrote [16]. Ay Tjoe’s work testifies to this journey, this incessant quest for authenticity and fullness.
What makes Ay Tjoe’s approach so powerful is that she does not content herself with illustrating these psychoanalytic concepts, she embodies them in the very matter of her works. Her canvases are not representations of the unconscious, they are direct manifestations of this psychic energy that Jung called libido. The artist works in a state close to trance, as she herself confides: “I work almost in a trance” [17].
For Jung, authentic art draws directly from the deep layers of the psyche, where archetypes and the collective unconscious reside. “The artist is the unconscious instrument of his time”, he wrote [18]. Ay Tjoe, through her exploration of inner abstractions, becomes the spokesperson for our contemporary anxieties, our existential questions in a world in perpetual mutation.
Ay Tjoe’s works refer us to our own complexity, our own contradictions. As Jung wrote, “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” [19]. This confrontation with our shadow side, this recognition of our fundamental duality, constitutes one of the most troubling and necessary experiences that contemporary art can offer us.
Christine Ay Tjoe offers us much more than paintings to hang on our walls. She proposes a descent into the depths of being, an initiatory journey through the successive layers of our consciousness. Her works are not objects of decoration, but tools of self-knowledge, mirrors that reflect our own image, deformed, fragmented, but strangely recognizable.
So let yourself be caught up in these whirlwinds of colors and lines. Let yourself be destabilized by these forms that oscillate between the organic and the ethereal. For it is precisely in this disequilibrium, in this zone of discomfort, that the true power of Ay Tjoe’s art resides. An art that does not caress you in the direction of the hair, but that shakes you and forces you to look beyond appearances, into the dizzying depths of your own being.
- “Small Flies and Other Wings was sold for HK$1.7 Million by Phillips auction house in Hong Kong” – Art World Database, “Christine Ay Tjoe”, 2021.
- Bachelard, Gaston. “The Poetics of Space”, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
- Bachelard, Gaston. “The Poetics of Space”, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
- Ay Tjoe, Christine. Interview with Elephant Art, “Now Showing: Christine Ay Tjoe, Inside the White Cube”, July 15, 2016.
- Bachelard, Gaston. “Air and Dreams”, José Corti, 1943.
- Bachelard, Gaston. “Earth and Reveries of Rest”, José Corti, 1948.
- Bachelard, Gaston. “The Poetics of Reverie”, Presses Universitaires de France, 1960.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Roots of Consciousness”, Buchet/Chastel, 1971.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Man and His Symbols”, Albin Michel, 1987.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychological Types”, Georg éditeur, 1950.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychology and Education”, Buchet/Chastel, 1963.
- Ay Tjoe, Christine. Interview with Allie Biswas for Studio International, “Christine Ay Tjoe: ‘I will always treat every medium as paper and pencil'”, December 21, 2018.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Dialectic of the Self and the Unconscious”, Gallimard, 1964.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Man and His Symbols”, Robert Laffont, 1964.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Present and Future”, Buchet/Chastel, 1962.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, Gallimard, 1973.
- Ay Tjoe, Christine. Interview with Elephant Art, “Now Showing: Christine Ay Tjoe, Inside the White Cube”, July 15, 2016.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “The Soul and Life”, Buchet/Chastel, 1963.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychology and Alchemy”, Buchet/Chastel, 1970.
