This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
— Rumi

Waqas Khan does not offer any insights on how to navigate one’s way through the cryptic marks he offers up — marks which have expanded vigorously from their early diminutive beginnings. Coming across these secretive, somewhat tender accumulations of mark-making in 2009, one could only surmise that these were private communions that the artist was sharing for the first time. There was a shyness about the work which implied that Waqas Khan was as yet unsure about the veracity of his purpose. Yet the precision of the mark belied any self-doubt that may have lurked in the artist’s mind. The works spoke of an attentiveness to craft which invited the viewer’s focus. A carefully modulated concentration was apparent in even the most sparse of images. Strangely, Khan himself seemed an unlikely practitioner of such quietude.

According to his own account, he spent much of his time as a student at the National College of Art (NCA) avoiding the studio regimen, relishing instead all other activities and indulgences that engage art students. It was by sheer accident that he found himself at the NCA in the first place. His doodling in the cafeteria of the rumbustious boys’ college down the road caught the eye of the waiter, who advised him to make his way to the NCA, a place more conducive to his talents. Waqas’s visit to the art school was a revelation. It took three years of doggedly applying and reapplying before he secured a coveted place.

With no notion of where he was headed, he chose the department of fine art as possibly the least demanding. He dallied along the way during his NCA years, without much passion or any inkling of why he was doing art and what he was. A series of almost accidental circumstances led to the Eureka moment at ‘Shift’, his first body of work exhibited at Rohtas2 Gallery. The work was sequentially laid out for him to see, dwell upon and be enthralled with. The fusion of the strands of intuition, energy and passion that he had been looking for during the years of exuberance fell into place with unexpected clarity.

There is a widespread romantic perception about how artists ‘find’ themselves. Myths abound about how and why the artist species differ from other mortals. But those who know the sheer persistence, constant investigations into techniques and materials, never-ending searches and cul-de-sacs of ideas, understand the toil such myths elicit from the artist. The risk-taking and the loneliness is seldom mentioned.

Waqas Khan’s work invites the onlooker into a world of solitude. It insists that the viewer engage with the myriad journeys of the marks and dots which can turn inwards or just seep outwards in trails across silent spaces

Khan’s work invites the onlooker into a world of solitude. It insists that the viewer become a participant, engaging with the myriad journeys of the marks and dots which can turn inwards or just as easily seep outwards in trails across silent spaces. The works excite a curiosity about their ‘making.’  There are unfoldings which appear to have a mind of their own as though they lead the artist, rather than the other way round. The sheer autonomy of the mark is almost a transgressor, suggesting that the artist, trance-like, follows its dictates. These deepen their hold on the viewer, as they become pathways to enter places and spaces within oneself. To quote Rumi,

“Listen to presences inside poems
Let them take you where they will.”

Alternatively, they echo the fabric of the physical world. One sees folded skin, wrinkles produced by age. Or is it threadbare muslin? Textile grown weary with use, now suspended in space? The black ‘vaslis’ are shadowy darkened rooms which are mystifying and secretive in their meanings. The barely discernible white marks reproduce themselves like the warp and weft of the silken night. The spirit of solitude invoked by these works is not unwelcome for the viewer. It suggests a floating space, imbued with intensely-felt poetic experiences.

I asked Waqas if he worked to music, for obvious reasons. The analogy to musical sounds seems to be present in his work. The marks replicate sound waves, musical notes, rhythms and pauses. The ‘abstract’ art of music comes easily to mind in these sensory encounters and one can ‘hear’ echoes from one’s memories of uplifting sounds. “Not anymore,” he replies. It is a thing of the past for him. He works in silence, often oblivious to sounds around him. The process takes over and shuts out everything but the sound of the pen as it scratches, presses and glides across the vasli. The repetitive marks mesmerise the maker just as they do the viewer. The surface demands total focus, unerring judgement and an almost prophetic knowing of where the next mark must go.

The artist is aware he has been transformed by these experiences. His happy-go-lucky days in which he was content to concern himself with the immediate and the peripheral have evaporated. He has become a ‘people listener,’ as he terms it. Delving deep inside his own being has led him to probe the stories that reside in others, including his own family, their histories and origins. Their trek across the borders at the time of Partition was a saga unknown to him. He now seeks to fill out the details of these chronicles of pain and loss. He is open to random people he comes across who are willing to share their narratives and dreams. He had never thought of himself as functioning in this way — ‘from within’ as he puts it.

Discovering his closeness to the earth that binds him to his rural origins has been a revelation. He marvels at how alive he feels because of these discoveries, these sensations of belonging which are almost physical, and the contradictory, yet curiously comfortable, proximity of his body to his spiritual journeys which have commenced through the work. The intensity of both these components reflects life itself.

Anish Kapoor once remarked “artists don’t make objects, artists make mythologies and it’s through these mythologies that we read the object.” It is through these multiple interpretive possibilities that one navigates Waqas Khan’s work. The artist leaves us free to roam the fields of his creation.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 15th, 2017