Waqas Khan: Acoustics of life

Waqas Khan (b.1982, Pakistan), who studied print making at the National College of Arts in Lahore/Pakistan, models his filigree works after the Bardhakhat technique, a basic technique of Persian Mughal miniature painting. This involves the artist applying thousands of small dots, lines and dashes to the paper with the greatest of precision.

The points of departure for his drawings are the artistʼs early experiences of his childhood and various personal stories that connect him with his environment taken from various contexts. It is the experience of time that is inherent in these stories that interests him first and foremost – time also as the universal, transforming entity accompanied by energy as for instance the perennial rise and setting of the sun. The all-encompassing air links all beings for which he has selected the dot as a metaphor. His artistic understanding could be described as follows: “Being a visual practitioner I cannot disassociate from the emotive energies of the cosmos, as their transformative phases are synced with me in person and my practice becomes its reflection.” The understanding of these stories was and is the greatest challenge.

The dot as the central element of his drawings evolved slowly, just as the intensive approach with special breathing techniques, a constant inhaling and exhaling, which reflects the ephemerality of forms in space, regardless of whether they are large or small. The singular point among many thousand points in a picture is the reflection of emotional experience in which space and time merge, sometimes in a subconscious and oneiric way.  The curiosity about what lies behind it, what is inaccessible, always led Waqas Khan to this point and its role in Sufism, which he cites as the significant influence of his work. The non-valuative practice that he likens to the observation of a tree or the ocean of life is a matter of concern to him and it is something that should not limit the viewer in interpreting a piece but rather generate intuitive moments. Waqas Khan remarks: “In summation the relative interplay of space and time of individuals is a continuous cycle of causes and effects and vice versa, a process, which becomes a palette for me, essential to my explorations, inquiring the visual language of the immediate environments as a medium, informing the temporal content of my visual practice.”