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About Ahmad Zoay - Walk on the Wild Side
Refreshingly different from the bulk of middle-of-the-road, sane and sociable career artists who thrive amidst the established parameters of society, Ahmed Zoay treads a wild path, challenging those Very parameters and society’s sense of identity.
Yet it is not just a predisposition to anarchy but what he has created out of an erratic gypsy life that lends authenticity to Zoay and his work. Moreover, there is no duplicity between the two; he creates what he is. In the freedom of Munictjor Paris communes, in the bondage of marriages in Berlin or Pompeii, during the psychedelic 1970s at Lahore’s NCA as an enthusiastic student or in paranoid hiding during the height of repression under Zia, he has always painted or sculpted his experience without mincing his vision or veiling it
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To Zoay art, like life, is not a part- time job. In fact, Zoay’s otherwise haphazard biographical outline makes better sense when seen through the perspective of his work: as if his life had been a fruitful struggle on a sketchbook, aimed at perfecting his creative expression. The best thing is that for the 47-year- old Zoay, the struggle continues.
It was written that Zoay would travel. Born Ahmad Zahir in Ludhiana in June 1947, he was brought over to this side of the divide as an infant. Being the son of an armyman, he spent his childhood in schools all over the country. |
Zahoor-ul-Ikhlaq’s Views about ZOAY
April 1985 |
In retrospect, Zoay believes that his formal education taught him nothing but lies about history. He remembers only acouple of things with any fondness from this early period: romance with the trees and blossoms in Abbottabad as a schoolboy and Karachi city life with fellows at D.J. Science College.
In 1969, Zoay’s life turned a new leaf upon arrival at the National College of Arts. Lahore was a different place at that point in time; the hippies had also discovered the city and Shakir Ali grappled with the creative process, encouraging avant garde originality. It was just the right place to land and find friends and teacher in the people around you. He spent many of those days with Colin David and Zahoorul Akhlaque, and while living at Salima Hashmi’s place for weeks on end.
Shakir Ali used to take special interest in his work. In class he would spend a long time in front of Zoay’s assignments, sometimes giving him his personal brushes and paints. This special treatment invited as much jealousy as admiration.
Restless in his creative pursuits, he would build sculptures out of old chairs or bricks, and paint murals on classroom walls which were dismantled or whitewashed by the envious despite Shakir Ali’s appreciation of them.
Another controversy was generated when Shakir Ali selected two of Zoay’s paintings for inclusion in a group exhibition of the NCA faculty in Karachi. But his work was appreciated by many artists, and one of the paintings, Landscape in Green, also caught the media’s attention. Zahir became Zoay when a teacher Ahmad Khan insisted that a signature other than Ahmad was required for the budding artist to avoid confusion.
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Outside the college, Zóay was drawn towards misfits of every variety and nationality, and spent a great deal of time with them, listening to them jam in a Gulberg Main Market basement, meditating on the Ravi, and soon. Zoay took a trip to the mountains with a black American hippie, a dope and acid freak, who had become his friend and guru and nothing remained the same after that. “It was like a revelation, a spiritual journey,” remembers Zoay. On his return, he could not take the college or his studies seriously, and dropped out in 1971 to travel.
That was the beginning of a life on the go. Hitch-hiking through Afghanistan and Iran, Zoay reached the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, a meeting point for freaks from the world over. In those days, the world was a festival, and freaks were all too eager to help out their comrades-inspirit. One obliging hippie passed on, over a joint or two, addresses of friends in Paris and Munich who would take good care of him.
An American hippie who had dropped out of the army to travel, drove like mad through Eastern Europe and dropped Zoay Off in Munich on his way to Italy. |
Zoay’s host in Munich was an affluent and decadent young man who was separated from his wife and was learning Chinese for the benefit of a teenage girl he’d seen in the Far East. He had a party on Zoay’s arrival and introduced him to friends and bubbleheads. Zoay sketched them and theywere impressed. The next day, his German host took him to a stationery and paints shop and told him to buy whatever he pleased. This patronage’ lasted for quite a while and Zoay kept painting and partying till he left for, Paris.
His hosts in Paris were a young woman and her mother. They looked after him and showed him the museums and galleries.. They even supported his daylong reveries in the Louvre for weeks. For Zoay, another world had opened up. He saw the masters, devoured the geniuses of Picasso and Cezanne, and travelled on through communes, a free man open to experience. From Paris Zoay travelled to Munich where he was hosted by another kind family. Life was simple in those days,” say Zoay. “People took you home, you lived with them, when it didn’t work out, you moved on.” |
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