Waqas Khan: the Pakistani artist who makes you want to say yes

Source: The Guardian

Inspired by Sufi songs and scripture, Waqas Khan toils through the night making vast hypnotic pictures out of tiny dots – and his work is now being snapped up around the world. Jonathan Jones goes drinking with art’s hottest new star

Detail from The Text in Continuum, 2015. Photograph: Waqas Khan/Galerie Krinzinger, Wien

Jonathan Jones

 

Waqas Khan is talking to me in paradise. Or at least, his art makes me feel as if I’ve been transported there. The artist’s delirious drawings are all around us in Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger: spirals, waves and circles that shimmer delicately in pink, black and white ink. Some are vast. One resembles a gigantic book. Yet when you walk close up to them, each turns out to be composed of thousands of tiny, extremely precise dots.

They make you feel differently about yourself and the world. Fifteen minutes after arriving at his latest exhibition, I felt cleansed and relaxed – like I’d been in a hammam. And after a couple of hours, I had the same feeling I got when I first walked through the light-as-air tiled wonderlands of the great Islamic buildings of Andalusia.

Khan, 31, is breaking down the barrier between traditional Islamic art and the contemporary art world. His prices are soaring as he shows all over the world, from this cutting edge Austrian gallery to the Frieze art fair, while big institutions – including the British Museum and the V&A – are snapping him up (“while we can still afford you”, one BM curator told him). Yet the really important, urgent thing about this extraordinary young Pakistani artist is his message of peace. The calm emanating from his art is not just an aesthetic effect – it speaks of a spiritual vision rooted in the Sufi side of Islam.

Around the edges, as i see it, 2015, by Waqas Khan. Photograph: courtesy the artist/Galerie Krinzinger

“I deal with the script of the Sufi,” says Khan, as he smokes. “It’s a side of Islam that is peaceful, happy. For me, Sufism is like meditation, that kind of calm.” He first encountered its ideas as a child, having grown up in a village where stories of Sufi mystics are remembered in folklore. “People would come and sit in the communal space and sing about the Sufis,” he says. “I was the kid holding the cups of tea. They would just talk about the good things for everybody in this world – love, peace and kindness. Sufi for me is behaviour, how you are with others.”

So how can you express love in art? One way is to make it with love. Art created by a devoted hand projects its kindness into the space around it and the hearts of those who view it. This, anyway, is what I feel among the works of Khan. Yet he wasn’t born or brought up a mystic and his family definitely did not expect him to pursue an artistic career. “In the village I come from, there are two professions: doctor or engineer. My family wanted me to be a doctor.”

Khan’s father is a businessman, his mother a maths teacher. He always drew as a kid, but when he got it into his head to apply to the National College of Arts in Lahore (whose first principal, he says, was Rudyard Kipling’s father), his family’s worst fears – of a child throwing it all away for art – seemed to be confirmed, especially since it took him three attempts to get accepted. Once in, he says, he was not exactly studious: “I was the one who was always at parties.”

Waqas Khan: ‘This work changed me. It pushed me into kindness.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

One of the key influences on his style, which has matured quickly since his graduation in 2008, was the college’s course in miniature painting. The Mughal dynasty, one of whose imperial cities was Lahore, sponsored a superb style of precise and richly coloured figurative art on a small scale in the 17th century. At college, Khan was able to learn its delicate techniques. Even the paper he uses is traditional, thick archival paper like that used for miniatures in the age of Akbar the Great – though Khan’s pens are modern Rotrings. In fact, he’s actually getting a bit bored of being compared to Islamic scribes as if he were a character in My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Ottoman artists. “It’s a cliche,” he says.

When his work was shown at the V&A in 2013, a magnifying glass was supplied so that people could look, in mind-boggling detail, at the high-definition ink dots with not a single mistake or blot. In reality, though, the all-over shimmer of his art is just as important as its microscopic detail, and he has much in common with western minimalists such as the painter Agnes Martin.

Certainly, when he describes himself at work, it is hard not to think of a secluded scribe. His studio in Lahore is tranquil. He works through the night, by battery-powered light because of the unreliability of Pakistan’s electricity. His desk is a specially adjustable drawing table that he designed and made himself. He bends over the paper using both hands for perfect ink-dot accuracy. “In a miniature painting, you can change a mistake,” he says. “I don’t have that option.” And he works like that for hours, nights, weeks. “My whole body’s hurting but making this art is so lovely. It’s like writing: a dot for me is a word. I can tell by every dot what my mood was. This work literally changed me. It pushed me into some sort of kindness.”

Waqas Khan’s The text in continuum, 2015, on show in Vienna. Photograph: courtesy the artist/Galerie Krinzinger, Wien

The most powerful of all the hypnotic drawings in Vienna is a diptych of two tall sheets resting against each other at an angle, like the pages of a gigantic book. The organic flesh-like pink waves that rise and fall across their surfaces, composed of innumerable dots, give off a powerful feeling of antiquity. This is a book whose words are in a lost language, yet somehow they are clear. The ancient wisdom cannot be read but it can be felt. In a world of terror, fear and violence, this is the book of peace – a vision of harmony and happiness rooted in Islamic art and Sufi scriptures. “One of my teachers used to say, ‘If you get something good from any religion, just take it.’ It’s not about Islam or Sufi – it’s about everybody.”

At 2 am, we’re in a Viennese bar and I don’t know if I am drunk on the cocktails, the Sufism, or the art. There aren’t many young artists around whose vision is as clear as Khan’s. There are even fewer with something of such importance to say. At the restaurant, he noticed the napkin-holders made nice bracelets and, as we were leaving, asked if he could keep one. They happily agreed. There’s just something about this artist that makes you want to say yes.

• Waqas Khan – Acoustics of Life is at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, until 28 February