Ay Tjoe has developed her unique visual language over decades, one which combines amorphous abstract forms, tangles of sinuous lines and areas of riotous painterly gesture suggestive of an internal, psychic struggle. In this new series, swollen, inflated forms in translucent washes invoke bodily organs or shards of skeletal matter, with sprawling tendrils encircling them like venous strands. In these new paintings, the artist’s sanguineous palette serves as a visual metaphor for familial bonds. The forms are ‘like a blood clot’ and for Ay Tjoe, refer to the way in which family members unite in the face of loss or gather like platelets around an instance of trauma – a motif that is as much about pain as it is about loving unity. In the diptych Covered and Cover #04, the organic form coagulates into further swells of crimson matter and bleeds, dramatically, uncontrollably, across two canvases. Understanding familial ties and the intergenerational as a matter of both socio-cultural and biological inheritance, Ay Tjoe’s paintings point to the interlinking of the body and the mind, and painting as a place where the psychical manifests as material.

Forged through intuition and introspection, the canvas has provided a space of psychological release for Ay Tjoe, such that the paintings ‘operate as though attempting to solve and combat the problem’. Oscillations between chaos, spontaneity and measured exertions of control unfold out across the works, unearthing the vicissitudes of the artist’s personal reflections on death and grief. Though the actualisation of the painted image in this new body of work involves a process of catharsis for Ay Tjoe, it also speaks to the artist’s quest for equilibrium: ‘what I create is still in harmony and balance’. The single- and two-panel paintings in ‘Covered and Cover’ involve globus masses gravitating around a knotted centre – some loosely, others tightly – in various states of convergence and resolve.

In previous bodies of work, Ay Tjoe has explored the idea of intentional constraint, and the relationship between individual acts and the wider community. Exploring the family as a contradictory site of concealment and redemption, Ay Tjoe’s new series is underpinned by a similar suite of concerns. A strong personal commitment to respectful deference in parental relationships pervades the thinking behind these new works, drawing upon Eastern philosophies, and particularly the Confucian notion of filial piety (xiao 孝 ). Grounded in a social ethic of intergenerational care, filial piety emphasises the role of respect, devotion and deference to one’s elders, one to be enacted in accordance with rites (li 禮).¹ In Confucian teachings, such acts of filial devotion are thought to result in greater harmony, at the level of the individual, the family and broader sociopolitical realm. Ay Tjoe’s visualisation of a form to express the emotional action and inaction that emerges from family silence allows the artist to convey feeling in the absence of speech. Painting becomes a place of transformation for quietude, such that the works are themselves a route for contending with a personal, unspeakable turmoil while observing the greater needs of the family.

Arising out of a pursuit of harmony within herself and for the family, Ay Tjoe’s paintings evidence an attempt to halt a cycle of intergenerational trauma through the act of covering, rather than verbalisation. Together, the works consider introspection and concealment as a protective device that, like a blood clot, exists to encourage the healing of wounds. Applications of oil stick onto a primed white canvas result in visceral, coagulating abstract forms, appearing to metastasise across the canvas as the artist’s grief and trauma is covered, and covered again.