June 26, 2002	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 14, 1423

WASHINGTON, June 25: American truckers might sit around truck stops bragging about the newest air brake or high-powered horn.

In the tea shops of Karachi, they talk art.

That’s according to anthropologist Mark Kenoyer, the field worker who found the vehicle that the Smithsonian is bringing over for a demonstration of the contemporary art of Pakistani truck painting.

You heard right.

In Pakistan, a typical privately owned rig will be covered from stem to stern with intricate grille-work, jangling chains, a majestic “prow” jutting out above the cabin, outside-mounted speakers for the CD sound system and wall-to-wall paintings featuring likenesses of politicians, movie stars and such celebrities as the late Princess Diana of Wales.

Not to mention the occasional “Mona Lisa” or scene of prehistoric hunter-gatherers cribbed from a science textbook and flora and fauna of every imaginable kind.

Painter Haider Ali and body worker Jamil Uddin will decorate (or, rather, continue decorating, since the truck they’ll be working on is already semi-complete) a reconditioned 1976 Bedford as part of the festival’s folk art programming.

“There are a lot of regional differences,” says Kenoyer, who notes that a trained observer can often identify where a truck was made as well as the driver’s ethnicity from “quite a distance.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post