Indonesians in Focus: Ay Tjoe Christine

By Barrie | November 1st, 2007 | No Comments

Among the young contemporary Indonesian artists, Ay Tjoe Christine takes a special place. Hardworking, and commanding a variety of techniques, she is also blessed with great integrity. She has exhibited internationally, and her works find appreciation from curators and collectors alike.

Born in Bandung in 1973, Ay Tjoe spent most of her early youth in an alley where there was hardly any space for children to play. Her playground was within the house, with paper and colored pencils or crayons as her most favorite toys.

Drawing became part of her young life. Somehow, it evoked in her the desire to make paintings like her mother who did so to adorn the house.

She entered art school at the Bandung Institute of Technology, but in her first year at school where she majored in graphic art, she thought she would never make it. But instead of quitting, she silently kept her frustrations to herself.

She was lucky that she was noted by a well-meaning senior at school who saw her talents. But it was only by triggering her fury through grave offense that he succeeded in having her spill out her emotions in works that were to be the beginning of her artistic career.

After she graduated in 1997, she began working in a textile plant and then became a successful fashion designer. But she ultimately decided commerce was not for her.

Hers was the world of art. Dry-point, a printing method by which the design to be printed is etched directly into the metal printing plate, became her favorite tool.

In fact it fit her perfectly. With it she would unleash her emotions, finding solace in pressing the needle hard onto the plate. Her mastery of dry-point, the raucous, abrupt angular lines, brought a new vibrancy to the art of printmaking.

From her first solo exhibition (2001), she had one almost every year, with a pause of three years between her third (2003) and fourth (2006), but then moving on full steam with her most recent (2007) titled Silent Supper, where she excelled with works in which her command of various techniques became apparent in digital print which combined photography with painting, installation, comics and her signature dry-point.

Her themes reveal a concern with the flaws of society, but also with her own “shortcomings”.

The King of Pilgrims, an early work in mixed media showing emaciated figures struggling to the top, which attracted wide public attention and became one of the Top Five in the 2001 Philip Morris Indonesian Art Awards, for instance, was a reflection of people going on a pilgrimage just for the sake of show off.

Her installation at the First CP Open Biennale in 2003 was a critique on high-level officials who had lost sight of social realities. “Santa/Satan” showed a small sculpture featuring a puppet made of hard cotton wool and set within a transparent box, suspended from the wall, with a bundle of coarse ropes set beneath the box.

At some stage she began probing into the self, exploring the duality of the self. As she matured, she increasingly showed emotional depth with works revealing her struggling soul.

This was particularly evident in her solo exhibition titled “aku/kau/kuak” (the title plays with the words `me’ and `you’), held in 2003. Si Kepala Besar 1 and Si Kepala Besar 2 (The Big Head 1 and 2), Si Pemabok, Sang Pemabok, Sang Fanatik (The Drunk and the Fanatic), they all denote personal problems.

Why is it that the self always wishes to be prominent? she ponders comparing this to a mountain that always peeks out, in her series Aku dan Gunung (Me and a Mountain).

Then, in 2006, she is seen trying to kill the ego in an effort to comply with real life where togetherness is valued highly. But her explorations through various mediums reveal the dominating ego that seems to be hard for an artist to deal with, even if the notion might be different.

Surely it is interesting to see how she blurs the ego by concealing the faces or identities in the collective of figures that now appear in layered meanings.

Remarkably, in the beautifully executed works in pencil, vague contours of what could be a figure and drawn in the likeness of dry-point go over the drawing as if to proclaim the artist’s presence.

While the pencil drawings at first sight may appear as a flower bouquet or dreamlike images, a closer look reveals an inner struggle.

In Bertigapuluh #3, for instance, human heads with distinct faces or covered by hair, appear wanting to get out of their limited spaces. In Bersepuluh #2, emanates a gender issue as a woman’s breast is hesitantly appearing, while the background a vague drawing of an embracing couple is discernible.

Sometimes the figures in her drawing give the impression of struggling in the air, were it not for the two skeleton-like feet that carry the lot. Legs never fail to take the appearance of skeleton or stalks, while feet resemble paws.

It seems Ay Tjoe, who used to be self-contained, was desperately trying to comply with society. But as her paintings show an intertwining of body parts, the faces remain masked or blurred, with only one or two showing part of facial features and her drawings still appear like human wrestling in the air.

Her objects showed yet another side of the artist who started doing objects as a leisure activity. Expressing life’s issues, her puppets come to life hovering between refined handicraft and fine art. Some of them have been “preserved” in a fine glass box, others appear in digital print on canvas. This was to be elaborated in her 7th solo exhibition, held recently under the title Silent Supper.

Creating images of doll-like puppets, Ay Tjoe sets the stage like a stage director, elaborating her thoughts on nourishment, something she had earlier found interfering with her creative drive. For Ay Tjoe, eating is something that should be automatic, carried out with the least effort possible, and should take place in silence, the way plants nourish themselves in nature.

The puppets take the form of dramatic comics that fill her canvas with hospital settings where drips channel nutrients to the patient’s body. In others, the puppets seem to be in street scenes with poor people ravishing their food, or show children intensely involved in their own activity.

It seems Ay Tjoe brings together the experiences and observations of daily scenes and issues that are deeply imprinted in her silent world.

These works, digital print on Hahnemuehle fine art canvas, underwent a layering process to achieve its final format. First the artist made the puppets, then arranged them in a setting that should represent her thoughts. She then took a picture of the setting, and printed it on the canvas to go over it with acrylic, and incorporate her signature dry-point as a final accent.

With touches from the naive, the real and the surreal, and elements suggesting comics, Ay Tjoe Christine’s latest works, like almost all of her works, are in a class apart.

Carla Bianpoen