Outside Perspectives

At the home of The AFK Collection’s founders Aliya and Farouk Khan, the only constant is change as narrated by Zena Khan following the most recent hangings of new works at the family house.

Since the mid-1990s, when Aliya and Farouk Khan moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, their interest in art and patronage of artists has coalesced into what is now formally known as The AFK Collection. Comprising over 1,000 unique artworks, many of these pieces represent the first generation of Malaysia’s contemporary artists. “Malaysian artists are one of the best in Southeast Asia,” Farouk says. “It says something about the period of the 1970s and 1980s in which this generation of artists lived, that they had deeper ideologies and sincerity than the current day when commercialisation and materialism is rampant.” To him, the art collection is important because it is a snapshot of the present time. “History is the past and art is the present. Artists are expressing how the world is going and keeping in mind that they tend to use the right brain, the many ways in which they express themselves visually rather than literally makes it so interesting.”

For his wife Aliya, who grew up in Pakistan, and Farouk, a Singaporean, coming to Malaysia and looking at it with fresh eyes, unsullied by the baggage of the Malaysian experience, made them realise how far ahead Malaysian artists were in their time. “I’m not saying slightly ahead but way ahead – and the proof is in the pudding as art prices in Malaysia have gone up 1,000 per cent in the last two decades.”

A recent hanging of artworks at the family home was undertaken by daughter Zena Khan, who is a curator at The AFK Collection as well as one part of the duo in Dua Konsultasi – an art consultancy founded by herself and her sister Leila. This weekend endeavour also saw some notable pieces being displayed including the six-metre by threemetre Az-zholimin (Tribute to Shagufta Akbar) by Hamir Soib Mohamed. The following is a narrative by Zena on how art becomes the central theme in the family house, with key observations on the sometimes prophetic and always thoughtprovoking pieces that have come to define The AFK Collection’s seminal works.

HAMIR SOIB MOHAMED Az-zholimin (Tribute to Shagufta Akbar), 2022

We were lucky to have this large wall because mum took three bedrooms and turned them into an extremely large master suite – so this wall is actually the other side of a walk-in wardrobe. This piece took Hamir, a leading painter from Matahati, nearly three years to complete. It depicts the story of Yunus in the belly of the whale, so the Arabic calligraphy used is stylised to form the whale’s ribcage. This painting is a throwback to the canonical style of Goya where old masters met with the beginning of the modernist period. It originated from Hamir’s despair at the spate of wildfires, wars and COVID, and the words are a prayer that Muslims say to find respite when all hope is lost. It’s done with bitumen that is watered down, with a final layer in acrylic which is how it attains its lustre and flow. The effect of smoke was difficult technically to paint – I was with him when he did a part of it. Essentially, he painted the negative area around the white with bitumen to create the smoke.