The exhibition title reflects Ay Tjoe’s interest in the freedom and clarity that emanates from intentional constraint. In a fraction, the numerator denotes the number of parts out of a whole. The denominator shows how many equal parts there are in total. To Ay Tjoe, the numerator is the part of the fraction that is ‘alive’, reflecting our choices of restraint or greed. Using the analogy of a pizza cut into eight pieces, she says, ‘I always like to say ‘one is enough’. The least numerator. The least, the smallest piece.’ This refers to her desire to only absorb the resources necessary and not more. The titles of the individual works are numbered from one to 12.

Ay Tjoe believes that restraint allows us to get to the essence of what gives life meaning. This new understanding, which she calls ‘a spirit’, ‘a sense of regulation’ and ‘a structure’, provides an ethical framework and an internal guiding light even as the world regains the prior scale and complexity of its operations and interactions. ‘It’s like we are collecting all the patterns, all the rules of life to make us ready and prepared (for whatever challenges lie ahead),’ she says. Her dream is to forge new patterns of life which will prepare future generations to contract and expand when times demand it, and to be flexible and resilient.

In the new works, this insight presents itself as flashes of vermillion within swirling organic structures reminiscent of flowers, vegetation, heart ventricles or vortexes. The paintings have a generally cool, muted palette of greys, blues and turquoise, with the contrasting red patches popping out as intense, fiery concentrations of vitality and movement, which remain half-hidden. In Lesser Numerator #06 (2023), red lies in the heart of the painting, wrapped under layers of blue and white films and tendrils. The red is like a ‘cameo’ appearance in a film, says Ay Tjoe, making a short but meaningful impact.

Some of the ideas in this show are developed from her solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong in 2021 titled ‘Spinning in the Desert’, which explored the idea of cryptobiosis – an organism’s state of inactivity triggered by extreme environmental conditions. Common in these two bodies of work are reflections on how a crisis forces us to rethink our ways of life, as well as the use of a predominantly blueish palette with red accents. In ‘Lesser Numerator’, the compositions are more compact and tightly wound in a circle. Here, the artist views each sphere as an entrance – a portal. The lines represent a multitude of doorways, and with so many of them, the space becomes complex. Full of overlapping and collapsing spaces, the compositions allude to the intensity of our lives and suggest that choosing the right space for oneself, that is, the right portal in the layered and complex world, can be a challenging task. 

Graduating with a degree in graphic design and printmaking at the Bandung Institute of Technology, in 1997, Ay Tjoe began her career as a graphic artist, working with intaglio, a drypoint technique typically employed in printmaking. For this exhibition, she uses oil bars to create effects that showcase the physicality, variety and subtlety of her artistic process. Her central nuclei are rendered in gestural, expressive strokes that reveal spontaneity and decisiveness, and the lines are sometimes packed very tightly onto each other, suggesting layer upon layer of compressed material. Then there are more generous spaces rendered in sheer washes of gentle hues like jade green or milky blue, generated through rubbing the paint with her hands across the canvas, and masterfully blending and layering the colours. Her techniques of creating tightness and openness combine to create a powerful sense of expansion, with coiled nucleus-like bodies seemingly in the process of turning, loosening and opening up. The use of white negative space, which gives the painting a sense of space and potentiality, allows for the growth and development in her central subject.

‘There is a new spirit in me,’ says Ay Tjoe, and it is a sense of optimism in the future that this mode of expansion – as the world responds to various crises – if made thoughtfully and consciously, should create the possibility for a life that is more purposeful and fulfilling, for individuals as well as for societies as a whole.

Christine Ay Tjoe was born in 1973 in Bandung, Indonesia, where she studied and continues to live and work. Her work has been exhibited across Asia, including a major retrospective at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2018) and in Europe at the Hall Art Foundation in Derneburg, Germany (2022). Ay Tjoe has also been featured in international group exhibitions, including Asia Society Triennial, New York (2020); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2012); Singapore Art Museum (2012); Fondazione Claudio Buziol, Venice, Italy (2011); Saatchi Gallery, London (2011); Shanghai Contemporary (2010); National Gallery, Jakarta (2009); Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2005); and the 1st Beijing International Art Biennale, China National Museum of Fine Art (2003).