Christine Ay Tjoe Covered Player #01 and Covered Player #02 2025

Christine Ay Tjoe’s prints, Covered Player #01 and Covered Player #02, combine graphite etchings and overlaid washes of colour to render amorphous forms that materialise psychological turmoil. Based on original drawings by Ay Tjoe, each individual print features hand-finishing by the artist, injecting every composition with expressive flurries of colouration. 

In addition to complicating and enlivening the underlying etchings, the variegated nature of Ay Tjoe’s hand-finishing process means that every print, across both editions, is unique. Ay Tjoe’s overlaid colouration traverses shifting palettes and degrees of control, ranging from restrained gestures to impulsive interventions. Whilst making these works, Ay Tjoe considered each pair of like-numbered prints as a cohesive duo that could ideally be displayed in tandem – with each pair employing a distinct method and palette of colouration.

Furthering Ay Tjoe’s longstanding artistic enquiries into intentional constraint, these works pick up on recent explorations into concealment as a protective device for the self.

As is typical of the artist’s recent work, the prints’ titles and subject matter contend with the act of making as a means of personal transformation and catharsis, meditating on loss, pain, and personal relationships. The notion of ‘covering’ is explored as a method of coping with emotional hardship – strengthening oneself through stoic silence. Across these prints, this concept is formally expressed through a multitude of overlapping forms and dense gradations of shading, finessed by the sometimes-playful introduction of colour, all layered atop one another.

Marking a departure from recent paintings that more obliquely allude to bodily organs, these prints teeter further towards the precipice of figuration. From a central globular mass, gnarled fingers strain towards the edges of the composition as organic matter trails downwards, suggestive of fungi, the tentacles of a jellyfish, and a flowering trumpet vine. A trousered leg kicks outward, whilst elsewhere hands of varying scales caress a faceless skull or brandish an emaciated limb. The amorphous, abstract forms combine with organic figuration – mark-making that configures pain as incomprehensible as it is universal, an inevitability in all life forms.

The etchings, printed by Huguenot Editions on Somerset Satin White 300gsm paper using a custom mix of graphite powder and etching extender, perfectly capture the sensitive mark-making and material characteristics of Ay Tjoe's original drawings. After printing, Ay Tjoe hand-finished each piece in her studio in Bandung, Indonesia, imbuing each work with a specific, sensitive echo of emotional interiority.

Charting a process of emotional fortification through the convergence of organic and abstracted motifs, Covered Player #01 and Covered Player #02 assert the inextricability of the body from the mind – each print a gestural manifestation of the psychical.