작품 상세

Happiness is to lounge on the barrel-back sofa, lit cigarette in hand, puffing a plethora of wispy smoke in front of you, like some intoxication. The mood is heightened for the southpaw man in black with the subdued darken tones. The relaxed atmosphere can be seen that the man’s feet are unclad, even in socks. It may be something liberating, unlike in a public place where smoking is widely prohibited, so as not to spread ‘secondary smoke.’ The smoke, both the smell and the listless sway, also has a soporific effect while the protagonist celebrates his private moments. The smoke conceals one's true identity (as the title suggests). This work may look like a come-on advertisement for cigarette smoking. It combines two of Ahmad Zakii Anwar’s early two preoccupations, the sofa and the Smoking Man, when he first broke into the art scene in his first solo at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, in 1997 — six years after giving-up a lucrative advertising job to go fulltime into art. Such notions of absence, and Man in his social environment, are also explored in his solo exhibition, Presence, at the Barbara Green Fine Arts in New York in 1999. Despite a first solo in 1997, Ahmad Zakii Anwar reveals a stunning repertoire of modern figures in a brand of Urban Dark Realism, sensual and mock-antique still-life, large fauna charcoals and traditional culture and dances in a short 11-year period in his mid-career Survey exhibition, Disclosure, at Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, in 2008. After graduating in Graphic Design from the Mara Institute of Technology in 1977, he concentrated on making a mark in advertising before fulfilling his destiny as an artist. He can boast of solos abroad like Presence (1999), Bones and Sinews (2011) in the United States, Kota Sunyi (Indonesia, 2007), Shadowland (Hong Kong, 2001) and Baik Art (South Korea, 2013), apart from his Singapore Tyler Print stint in 2007, etc.