Christine Ay Tjoe on art, motherhood and letting go

About fourteen years ago, before her son was born, there were doubts piling up that she was almost done with painting. She thought she might do more good deeds passing on what she knew to younger artists.

It did not go as planned. Exhibition offers kept arriving. “I said, okay, after this one,” she recalled. “Then there was another, until I forgot I’d set a target to stop.” Then she remembered an old prayer of hers, asking for work she loved that could also support her family. “So why was I asking to quit?”

The beginning had been modest. After graduating from ITB in 1997, she spent two years in a textile office. Her first solo show drew a quiet response, with friends doing most of the buying, until the curator Jim Supangkat visited in the final weeks. That led to Edwin’s Gallery and a three-year exclusive contract, and to something she could tell her family: this could be a future. Looking back, she reads the pattern with faith. “I keep open the possibility of God’s hand in it,” she reflected. “Not everything I hope for will finish the way I want.”

“I used to be quite rigid about my principles,” she admitted. “Now I have to be more flexible. I have to let go because I have to deal with so many changes.”

That rigidity showed up in the studio, too. She used to be, in her own words, ‘a forcer’. A good painting had to look in a certain way, and she pushed until it did. Now she hands over more. “If it’s time for it to be finished, then it is finished.”

She is aware that artificial intelligence unsettles many people in the art world. Her own view is calmer. She sees it as another thing made by humans, something worths understanding without giving it more importance than it deserves.

What she believes will remain difficult to reproduce is experience. A person standing in front of a painting brings their own memories to it. Something in the work may remind them of a particular moment, person or feeling. That connection cannot be separated from the fact that both the artist and the viewer are humans.

For Ay Tjoe, imperfection is part of that connection. “Something made by a human stays real, which means it will never be perfect,” she said. “Maybe that is what people relate to more.”

She sees a promising future in the younger generation of artists, who explore widely and are not tied to a single style. Her advice is to think long term. Opportunities appear easy now, she observed, which is why they call for discipline and humility, along with the habit of correcting and criticising oneself honestly. “Being a good human comes first,” that was how she put it. “The profession follows. Talent was not ours to begin with,” she added.

Her home is in North Bandung, close to a protected forest, where she finds it easier to be reminded of what is being human, something that she thinks that a big-city life can wear down. Bandung’s artists mostly keep to their own corners but she sees the upside: more time alone to measure what she can actually do.

Her taste in music is less predictable. She listens to electronic music, Daniel Avery among others, and likes it for its machine-like pulse. It keeps her going when the day gets chopped up by a guest at the door or something broken that needs looking at. The rhythm holds the thread while she is pulled away and back.

When I asked what comes next, her answer was short. “Keep making art. Make it better.” Art, for her, remains a medium for growing as a person, a place to reflect on whatever the day brings, and sometimes to find a way through it.

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