Christine Ay Tjoe’s Covered and Cover
White Cube New York
27 June – 16 August 2025
1002 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Christine Ay Tjoe’s Covered and Cover at White Cube New York marks a significant milestone in the artist’s career—it is her first solo exhibition in the United States. Known for her emotionally charged compositions and expressive abstraction, Ay Tjoe uses this opportunity to explore themes of family, grief, and cultural silence in a body of work that is both visually raw and formally restrained.
Set within the minimalist architecture of White Cube’s Madison Avenue location, the exhibition unfolds across two floors of white walls, soft natural light, and generous spacing. The gallery’s pared-back design offers an atmosphere of quiet reflection, especially during the calmer moments of the day. There are no distractions or elaborate installations—each painting is given space to breathe, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in the textures and emotional depth of the work.
Covered and Cover features organic, flesh-like abstract forms rendered in oil on canvas. Ay Tjoe builds her compositions with delicate washes of red, pink, black, and occasional blue, layered with gestural brushstrokes and densely pigmented areas that evoke blood, tissue, and tangled emotion. Despite their abstraction, the paintings feel deeply personal. Ay Tjoe describes these forms as metaphors for how families come together in times of pain—much like platelets clustering around a wound. Her brushwork is tender and intentional, suggesting a quiet kind of care and containment.
‘The emotion I’ve put into these works carries a kind of spirit — one that seeks to cover, and cover again.’ — Christine Ay Tjoe
Cultural references subtly inform Ay Tjoe’s work. Drawing from Southeast Asian traditions—particularly Confucian ideals of familial duty and emotional restraint—she visualizes the act of “covering” as both protective and repressive. Her swirling, layered compositions give form to the silence that often surrounds grief and emotional tension within many Asian households. The diptychs in particular emphasize a duality between revealing and hiding, expressing and suppressing.
One standout work, Covered and Cover #04—the only diptych on the first floor and visible from outside the gallery—features a rich crimson that spreads across two panels. The color pulses and pools, evoking a wound in progress. Yet the presence of negative space and subtle symmetry suggests a narrative not only of rupture, but also of healing.
Ay Tjoe’s ability to intertwine emotional depth with painterly restraint makes this exhibition a compelling and memorable debut in the U.S. Her work speaks quietly but powerfully, offering a nuanced meditation on family, vulnerability, and the cultural dynamics that shape how we express pain.
PRESS RELEASE:
Exploring notions of family silence and painting-as-catharsis, Christine Ay Tjoe’s first solo exhibition in the US debuts a new series revolving around the primacy of expressive gesture and a motif of blood. Borne out of processing the death of a parent and navigating the unspoken, the artist meditates on intergenerational relationships and the role of family silence in burying conflict and pain. The exhibition title refers to Ay Tjoe’s ongoing process of emotional fortification; speaking to a personal yet universal experience of grief, her paintings carry with them ‘a kind of spirit – one that seeks to cover, and cover again.’
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.
