Through the Looking-Glass

RASHID RANA gained fame by challenging stereotypes – especially of women – through his series of pixelated photomontages. He discussed his art with payal uttam during a recent visit to Hong Kong

PAKISTANI ARTIST RASHID RANA looks nervous. He’s posing for a photo shoot with his face masked in black fabric. “Look down, relax, a little to the left, OK,” calls the photographer. A few clicks later, the cloth disappears and he regains composure.

The fashionably dressed Rana cuts across the gallery and flicks through his phone. Late for his next appointment, he smiles resignedly and says, “That’s my life.” One of the contemporary art world’s latest darlings, Rana is in town for his first solo exhibition, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. He has arrived following a string of shows in London, New Delhi, Manchester and Singapore. It takes a moment to register, but we’re standing in a sea of images. On every wall hangs tens of thousands of tiny photographs cleverly positioned to form larger motifs. Meanwhile, on the floor rest sculptures coated in pixelated patterns.

“I wanted to compete with the age of advertisement,” explains Rana, sitting below a billboard-sized work. “I wanted to make images which can grab attention and entice people to look.” Indeed, each work forces viewers to lean close to the surface to examine individual vignettes, then move away to grasp the full picture.

Rana stepped out of obscurity in the early 2000s and rapidly gained recognition for his seductive photomontages. Perhaps most famous was his Veil series in which he assembled pornographic photographs of women into unlikely composites. From up close, the rows of nude bodies were visible but from afar they formed images of conservative women clad in burkas.

“The two narrow stereotypes destroy each other by being present as one,” says Rana. “Often I feel the narrative lies between extreme absurdities.” Lately, he has been translating similar ideas into the medium of sculpture. His first major three-dimensional work appeared at ART HK earlier this year. Titled Desperately Seeking Paradise (2007-08), it was a massive steel cube adorned with a skyline of buildings. The glistening cityscape was created using photographs of houses in Lahore.

A master of paradox, Rana’s genius lies in his ability to subvert our expectations. In his world, what appears to be innocent can suddenly switch to nightmarish. In Red Carpet I (2007), for instance, visceral photographs of abattoirs combine to form a Persian rug. Three years ago, the first edition of Red Carpet achieved the highest price by any living Pakistani artist at auction. Beautiful yet horrifying, there’s a deliberate frisson in the work that jolts the viewer. By juxtaposing the image of a domestic item with bloodshed, Rana calls attention to the desensitisation to violence in Pakistan.

Asked which work is his favourite, Rana points to the less gory Dis-location I (2007). From a distance it appears to be a gigantic postcard of a building from the 1920s or 1930s, yet it’s made up of photographs of a colonial-era structure that exists in present-day Lahore. With the help of assistants, Rana stationed a camera on the street opposite the edifice for 24 hours, taking a photograph every second. The images recorded changes in light and the daily activities surrounding the building. “So what seems to be frozen in time is actually living and breathing when you come close to it,” says Rana. By interweaving the stills taken during the day with those shot at night, he eliminated the idea of a beginning, middle and end, creating a non-linear image of time. On a deeper level, the work also questions stereotypes of certain countries as backward or stuck in the past.

Although much of Rana’s art touches on his experiences in Lahore, where he’s currently based, he’s cautious when it comes to speaking about his country. “It is very misleading to use the word Pakistan, because Pakistan is just a political boundary. Within it there can be such diverse things,” he insists, becoming increasingly animated. “I may have more in common with you than I have with someone in Peshawar.”

Like many other contemporary South Asian artists, Rana refuses to be defined by his nationality. Having lived in several countries outside Pakistan, he has been exposed to myriad influences. In the early ’90s, Rana moved to Boston to pursue a master’s degree in fine art. A few years later, he travelled to Paris and Tokyo to study fashion design.

After living overseas, returning to Pakistan was an adjustment for Rana. “People wanted to see me conforming to a certain image of an artist like being bohemian with ripped-up jeans, which is fine if it’s somebody’s choice, but it cannot be the only look for the artist, so I thought, ‘I am going to question that.’ ” He created a self-portrait titled Identical Views (2004) in which he wears a range of outfits. After filming himself in various stages of undress, Rana lined up the stills to create an abstract geometric pattern. “The identity of an individual can be associated with the kind of clothes we wear. They can become like a skin,” he explains. Unlike his other works, the Identical Views project spilled over into his daily life. Rana began to experiment with his appearance and staged what became impromptu performances. While working as a professor in Lahore, he assumed various guises on a daily basis, dressing in outfits that featured in Identical Views. On one occasion, he dressed in a full suit, conjuring the stereotype of a banker; on another he turned up in a salwar kameez, the kind of traditional Pakistani garb hardly associated with artists. Then there were the more extreme days when he dyed his hair and eyebrows blond and wore coloured contact lenses. “When they saw me changing all these appearances, the students stopped asking, they just thought, ‘This guy is nuts,’ ” he says with a smile.

Challenging preconceptions is a big part of Rana’s life and work. As a non-Western artist, he strives to broaden perspectives about Pakistan and avoid pigeonholing the country’s art. “My work is not about the West versus Pakistan, it’s actually a concurrent act of assimilation and rejection all at the same time,” he says. “You only comment on something if you love it and at the same time hate it. Both things happen together.” Although some argue that Rana’s approach spans too broad a spectrum, he remains unruffled. Since the mid-’90s, his goal has been to make his art accessible to the masses. Though he draws on isolated experiences from his daily life, Rana has a way of using them to tap into universal concerns. Looking at his art is like peering through a kaleidoscope. Lured by flashes of colours and fluctuating images, we succumb to a multifaceted view of reality.