A Man Apart

Ahmad Zakii Anwar

Zakii cites David Hockney and Edward Hopper as formative influences

The paintings of Ahmad Zakii Anwar are best viewed from the vantage of the tropical street where the artist was born in 1955 and still lives. It is lined with rust-mottled Proton sedans and boxy concrete houses, and wedged into the forested hills above the Malaysian port city of Johor Bahru, where the Anwar family has been prominent in politics since Malaysia's independence 50 years ago. Shaded by droopy banana trees, and crisscrossed by stray cats creeping through chain-link fences, the landscape lies somewhere between a sleepy kampong , or Malay village, and a soulless American suburb. "There...

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