Christine Ay Tjoe Covered Player #01 2025

Christine Ay Tjoe’s print Covered Player #01 combines a graphite etching, based on an original drawing by the artist, with overlaid washes of colour to render amorphous forms that materialise psychological turmoil. Each work in the edition is hand-finished by Ay Tjoe, injecting every composition with expressive flurries of colouration. 

Covered Player #01 was created alongside a companion print titled Covered Player #02. Whilst making these works, Ay Tjoe considered every pair of like-numbered prints as a cohesive duo that could be displayed in tandem – with each matching pair employing a distinct method and palette of colouration. 

Ay Tjoe’s approach to the hand-finishing traverses shifting degrees of control, ranging from restrained gestures to impulsive interventions. In addition to complicating and enlivening the underlying etchings, the variegated nature of this process means that every print, across both editions, is unique. 

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. In Covered Player #01, gnarled fingers strain from a central globular mass towards the edges of the composition as organic matter trails downwards, suggestive of fungi, the tentacles of a jellyfish, and a flowering trumpet vine. 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 etching, printed by Huguenot Editions on Somerset Satin White 300gsm paper using a custom mix of graphite powder and etching extender, perfectly captures the sensitive mark-making and material characteristics of Ay Tjoe's original drawing. 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 asserts the inextricability of the body from the mind – each print a gestural manifestation of the psychical.