21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Ay Tjoe Christine (b. 1973) was born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, and is a renowned contemporary artist active in Indonesia today. She studies intaglio printing methods such as drypoint and then turned to working with textiles. Her artistic activities got their real start around 2000. Ay Tjoe Christine’s works express themes based on Christian mythologies and spiritual concepts, supported by her deep insight into human incompletion and Janus-faced nature. The color fragments that scatter and float across her pictures reveal, on one hand, the actions of her own wavering emotions, while the abstract images that set up fascinating harmonies with the canvas’ negative space reveal her sincere stance as she investigates the relationship between humans and all things. This is Ay Tjoe Crhistine’s first solo exhibition at a Japanese museum, presenting about 50 works that trace her two decades of multifaceted creativity, from early period drawings and drypoint, to a group of oil paintings that explore the potential for expression from the representational to the abstract, soft sculptures and large-scale installations, and large format paintings created for this exhibition.