Seldom do we consider the vehicle used in a car bombing as we read about or watch the aftermath of the act on the news. The vehicle’s reason-for-being might be hinted at in a mention—sedan, van, truck—but having been repurposed for military use, the vehicle loses identifying characteristics like year, make, model, country of origin: signifiers that would place it in time and space are unimportant, as if the car had ceased to exist as a tool of one world once it became an instrument of the next. Not so in the recent work of Fawad Khan, the Libyan-born, Pakistani-American artist, whose first solo show, “Fast Traveling Passenger”, goes on display in March at 33 Bond Gallery. Khan’s exploding vehicles are painstakingly rendered central figures in his work. Imagined as war machines, they invoke the stories of their creation and lifespan, asking viewers to consider what has transpired in creating this result, this scene. The fires of the explosions are absent, as are the victims, although one might see the latter in the fragmented multiples of the lower bodies of soldiers in camouflage fatigues that spiral outward from and around the vehicles.

"Spectacle of Pride"

The travels of these machines—buses, late-model western cars, a U.S. Postal Service truck—how they made their way into these conflicts, which can be seen as images of both the present and future, are narratives within Khan’s exploration of East-meets-West.

COOL’EH sat down with Khan in advance of his upcoming show to discuss his work, and his complex personal and professional relationship with Pakistan.

You mentioned working as a designer and art director. Did you study design?

I did my undergrad at Maryland Institute and I studied with a New York and London illustrator, Julian Allen, he passed away during my undergrad years. And I actually contemplated changing out of illustration, and while I was doing that I did some electives in design and print and flash, things like that, so that’s how I gained my design sensibilities. But then in graduate school, when I came here and went to SVA, I did their program for people who, its called MFA Visual Essays, and it’s basically a mix of illustrators and painters. A majority of SVA’s students in the fine art program were doing installation or video work, and I wanted to do strictly flat work, so I looked into both departments and I thought that the teachers in the illustration department were just, they appealed to my sensibility more. And it’s funny because eight years later, seven years later, you see that the artwork was where I thought it was heading, in New York spaces.

Where is it that you perceived it heading?

I just feel like right now, first of all we see a general shift away from Chelsea coming down again to downtown New York, but I feel like the artwork has been—although it’s been getting very dirty and gritty for the last few years, and the Whitney can say what they say and the Chelsea galleries can show what they show, but I think that the younger artists that are in my generation, that are in their twenties right now, coming out of school, or have been out of school for a while, most of them that are showing in these spaces, the Lower East Side spaces are making work that’s gritty, that’s honest, but getting back to mixing craftsmanship with a message. I do think there is work, there’s thought behind it, there’s not only an idea or a concept behind the art that they want to get out there, which is what I think was happening in the late ’90s and early 2000s, now people are actually realizing what’s the best way to communicate that thought, what’s the best way to, for lack of a better word, illustrate it. I do think people are more conscious about aesthetics as well as concept.

You have what many would consider an interesting upbringing. Do you remember that point when you first became interested in art?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ve always been drawing since I can remember and my parents told me, obviously, but I recall having sketchbooks, not the kind that artists draw in now, but wide-ruled paper notebooks, when I was five, and just doodling. I used to do everything from cartoons to comic books throughout elementary school into junior high. It wasn’t until sixth grade that art teachers actually started finding things in the drawings and were like, “Oh we should put him in some of these different classes”. I went to a public school when we moved to the States, before that I was in all sorts of different private schools and academies, so I think that’s when it started. People started to take notice late in elementary school.

Once you got into secondary schools were you able to specialize at all?

No, not at all, I was still in public school, my interests were completely shifted. My brother was a basketball—he’s a basketball coach, coached women’s ball for seven years at UNC Asheville, and is now coaching at a private high school in San Francisco—he played basketball, and so I came in four years after in high school, under his legacy, so I thought ‘Oh I want to be the athlete, too, so I tried playing ball and I sucked, I sucked so bad…. I always knew I was an artist, I never realized I could do a career with it. My father is a physician, mom’s a social worker; my dad was pushing me towards medicine at that time. It wasn’t until my art teachers really made me stop and smell the roses and said ‘Look, you’ve got something here, you should really pursue a profession in arts’, and so they kind of sold me and I ended up starting to do portfolio reviews junior year in high school, and got into the art schools and that’s when I realized “Oh, this is kind of cool”, and then I got a bunch of scholarships and my parents were like, “Oh, this is kind of cool”. One thing led to another, I went to MICA and did study abroad in France, I developed a really strong portfolio in college, moved to New York and started showing here, and now my dad is like my number one fan. So it’s good where I am now, the whole family thing. Because my background, people tend to go toward medicine, engineering or computers. All about what’s your lifeline, when do you do this, when do you get married, and in the world of art, you make your own timeline.

"Go Postal (We Deliver For You)"

Right, timelines for art careers seem to always be different for each person.

Always different. I’m noticing that. I have friends that came to New York at the same time I did, just before 9/11, a few of them did their MFA at Columbia, a few of them went to Yale, a few of them were here in New York at Parsons or whatnot. And everyone has turned out different. We all wanted the same thing but everyone has turned out different. Different bursts of attention at different times in their careers, only a limited amount get picked up right after school and that was the trend, that is the trend is that there’d be certain MFA programs that, all they’re doing is just bringing you up to get out there and fall into the market. But I think you can easily disappear. You go into that Chelsea cluster you can easily fade away. You could be showing and selling and making money, but I don’t know if you’re really attaining that one thing which I consider a strong point in art and that’s longevity. So I’m taking my time. For the last seven years I’ve been editing exactly which shows I’m going to take part in because I’m in no rush, I’m here to stay. Everybody wants to be an art star, but you have to really, within kind of like an artist’s mentality, there has to be a little bit of pragmatics into it.

Has Pakistani art been an influence for you from the start, or was it something you had to go back after moving to the States and seek out?

I’m really glad you asked that question, because I was born in Libya and raised up in Pakistan before coming to the States, so I hadn’t gone back, believe it or not, until just before my graduate thesis. I went back after eighteen years in 2002, I went back to do my thesis there. When I moved to New York, one of the things I saw post 9/11, was that there was all of a sudden a huge desire from the western public, I guess, to understand my culture and my background, and I thought this is something that I really need to, I need to know it so that I can explain it, so there I was turning into the All-American kid, slowly transforming, when I realized hold on, I’ve gotta get back to my roots really quick and realize why it is I make this art and what it’s about, so I traveled back, I did some work there, I acted as visiting artist with one of the art schools, and as a grad student I worked with these undergrad Pakistani art students, which was a very enriching experience. At the same time, in New York, I contacted a prominent artist right now, Shazia Sikander—she shows with Sikkema Jenkins, she’s in collections with the MoMa, many other museums, the Whitney—so Shazia, I sent her an email and said “I’m a Pakistani artist I’ve moved to New York, I’m working on my thesis, I’m going to be traveling my second year of grad school, I’m going to get back to my roots, and that’s what my work’s about is this bridging of East and West”, and she came and did some studio visits and then decided to work with me externally as my mentor, and we’ve been friends ever since. And she’s the one that’s really helped me, helped guide my work, this way, that way, what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, not so much in a professional sense, more-so about the art itself, which is what it really needed. So when I went back to Pakistan after 18 years she actually gave me a few names to contact there, and that helped.

One thing I realized is that, on a professional level, I do not belong in that art world, I belong here in this art world. But on a more coming-of-age, as cheesy as it sounds, on that kind of level I really felt like, I should know this; I should know what’s happening here in a contemporary sense. But that trip changed me. I came back with such a fresh perspective on life and my art and that’s when I think something went off, like a light bulb just kind of went off and I started thinking about what kind of art can I make that, to me it’s narrative, can tell my story or my feelings, get my aggression out, but isn’t necessarily cliché or “exoticized”. That’s not at all what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to make art that’s me before it is a culture…. That’s important, every artist—even Shazia does that. Sometimes it sucks that that culture over there put her, they ostracize her, she’s an outcast to them because she’s achieved such success in the western art world.

Right, and then in the West there seems to be a tendency to worry so much about the culture of artists who aren’t from here that the artists themselves fade into the background, which is unfortunate because the individual experience is arguably what’s most important.

That’s right. I see it not only in our field, I see it in many other fields too. I have a lot of friends who come abroad, and you see it across the board.

The show that’s coming up, when you started creating these scenes that invoked car bombs and terrorism and things that are obviously on everyone’s mind at this point, were you ever concerned that taking that particular imagery was going to seem trite or sensationalist because its so capable of being used for it’s shock value?

For me this work has two sides to it. I am walking that very fine line between beautiful drawing and, for what you said, a shocking message or subject matter. For me—not that with the gouache and the beautiful drawing and that kind of wild factor in the art itself am I trying to downplay the message—but I am trying to be a little more subtle, I don’t want to be overt in my political views in the work because I’m an artist first, so a lot of the commentary is really for me to get my thoughts out and my aggression out, but at the same time I like that the viewer can look at it and make their own story. There are some people that like the work because the cars are just rendered with so much respect, they’re not at all bombed out, they’re actually colored and fully formed, so when people see those I’ve heard some people say, “Oh I love that piece” because it reminded them of a car their father maybe had, and other people would see it and say “Oh I love this because I totally see what you’re saying about this, and there’s that car bombing that just happened last week and this piece reminds me of that”. And so to have that double play in the art, that’s what I was going for. If I wanted to be sensational, man, I’m going to become a photographer and go do photojournalism and start really exploiting what’s happening abroad. But here we have an act that usually is associated with the Middle East, and all I’m doing is silhouetting it with a lot of white, the white of the paper, so for me all of a sudden I’m softening the blow, no pun intended, but that’s what it feels like.

"504 Accelerated"

What’s interesting to me when I am looking at it—I see what you’re saying because things aren’t necessarily blown apart they’re more fragmented—it’s almost like you have the effect, but what is the cause. So for me at least, it’s making me think “Ok, what is the cause, what’s the catalyst that fragments everything?”

Well you bring up an issue for me to face in the next direction this work goes, because I think that’s going to be the comment I get from a lot of people, is what’s the gut feeling that you as an artist get when you make these works. Right now I just wanted to paint the stage, and then in the next steps I want to take the theme further, and then aesthetically I’ll take it further, I don’t know where. But I see it growing on an immense level. And the thing is, I do think there is going to have to be a time where I have to face in the works themselves some sort of bridge between cause and effect. There may end up being a protagonist-antagonist role I may have to depict in the paintings in the future. Right now it’s just elements and you don’t know what’s good, what’s bad, why this happened, why its happening, why is this car in this shot and not that car, so…

Right, but I think, to me, it’s almost like it doesn’t need to be there because it is on everyone’s mind.

Yeah, again—posing the question and not giving away all the answers.

Do you have an opinion on how Pakistan has been portrayed in the Western media, especially given all that’s happened in the past year?

It’s funny, I’m basically restricted living here in New York by myself, I’m restricted to Western media, but whenever I visit the folks down in Maryland I realize with all their satellites and whatnot that they’re watching the channels from over there. It’s funny to see all the different viewpoints of all the different media stations. Looking at the country now I’m really, really afraid of what’s happening over there. I feel like our eyes are on it when we want to be on it, meaning American eyes; eyes are on Pakistan when we want them to be. Benazir was assassinated, all of a sudden cameras turn, Musharraf is stuck between a rock and a hard place, cameras turn. But growing up, I’ve seen the country from Bhutto’s hanging to the Islamasists, Zia-ul-Haq, that whole regime, then eventually to the ’90s with Benazir and Nawaz Sharif, their going back and forth, and now to Musharraf taking over with his coup d’etat. I just think it’s just piling up. It’s a young country, it’s so young, and not to belittle what’s happening there and the pride of everybody, but it’s going through such growing pains, you know, there are tendencies for civil war to break out. I just think it’s all about politics and different parties and what’s mine, it’s all about haves and have nots there. There is no emerging middle class. It’s haves and have nots, and those that are in power tend to get really corrupt when they realize that, “Oh we’ve got power in this very young country, the beginning of this country”. I don’t know; I’m really worried. To answer your question in a simpler way, I’m really worried for the future of that country. There are times when I wish I had the liberty to get up and go back there and maybe do something with my art or help out, and I do know some people that are using what they’ve attained here in the States to go back and do something—help out with hospitals after the earthquake, donate. But at the same time it’s risky. Every time I’ve gone over there I am considered an outsider now, and every time I’m here I’m questioned about my background, so I’m that hybrid, and so whenever I go I’m always very cautious about my safety first.

Do you see that worry about the future of the country making its way into your work at all?

You know, it’s funny, I’m trying to keep it out: one of the things I want to do with the work as it grows is that I want it to be passionate, but at the same time I don’t want it to be emotional. It’s a very fine line, I think, because passion can be considered as an emotion, but by passion I mean that I want it to be an objective passion, I don’t want it to be mixed with proud emotions about what the country’s going through. I think it’s a very fine line… That was a tough question. It really sucks what’s going on there. I always talk to my dad about it. Two things my father and I always talk about: politics and football. I’m always picking his brain constantly because I need to understand it from his perspective, cause he was there before partition, he was born before partition, he was born in India, in Rajasthan, and his family migrated over in a railroad car, hidden. And luckily they were in a safe car because his uncle was an engineer with the railroads. Because there was that whole period when all the Hindus that were in what became Pakistan were coming over, and everyone from that part of the country that were Muslims were trying to get over to what is now Pakistan. There was a lot of really horrific violence going on at that time…. Politically the changes that the country has gone through, that’s one of the big sources for the turmoil, and all those kind of political takeovers and coup d’etats and those different points of view in that country, my dad’s helped me see them in a different light than I would if I just grew up here reading Western media, so that’s good.

About the group show at Exit Art last year—and I know from talking to the directors at 33 Bond that you’re doing an installation here—when did you think that you wanted to change the medium you were working with and maybe branch out a bit with the concept or even just you’re work in general?

I’ve been wanting to do a wall painting with this idea… There’s something about the impermanence of a wall painting. The fact that it is here now and it’s going to happen and unless you don’t experience it or see it now, you’re going to miss it. For me, as a young artist, again getting back to what we were talking about, what a lot of artists are attaining out of their MFA, I think it humbles an artist to do [something impermanent]. I think you can make some really kick-ass work just flat on a wall, so you’re not afraid of making it because there’s not a product that’s going to be put away later in a flat file to go to a collector’s house or be put up in another gallery, it is just there, so if there’s a mess up it’s there, it’s part of the piece. So first off it allowed me to not be so precious. Conceptually the idea of impermanence, I really like that aspect and what it does with this, the whole fragmented soldiers with the foreign model autos. I also wanted to experiment with scale, make something impressive and grandiose in size, perhaps even life-size, and the first chance I ever got to do it was at the Exit Art show. I just never had the opportunity to do it before that show. I always wanted to find a space that could house a wall painting, I felt it was very important to start getting this work out into the public before I did a giant wall painting, but the opportunity presented itself for the Exit show…. I was really happy with it and I think they were too.

The taxi that’s going into 33 Bond Gallery: where did you get a hold of that?

This concept I actually came up with in 2004 for a show and just couldn’t realize it, I didn’t have the funds, but I wanted to take the traditional painting technique from these lorries, the giant transportation trucks, passenger buses in Pakistan, I wanted to take that tradition and I wanted to apply it to a car that we’re familiar with, a New York City taxi, and I also thought, considering that there are a lot of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi taxi drivers I thought it would be an interesting conversation. I could talk about many things, I could talk about class, you know, social places; I could talk about identity, artists getting into the role of being a truck painter, all those things. So I had that thought in ’04, I couldn’t realize it, the piece just sat there comp-ed up in a Photoshop file on my computer. When I did my studio visit with 33 Bond, it wasn’t until our third or fourth meeting that Mitch had talked about that one image that I had showed him, and he had remembered it. And he said “What about this idea”? So I ended up reaching out to an old high school buddy of mine and he’s got a shop down in Maryland as well as one in Pennsylvania and he’s the one that told me, he said, “Well look, I’ve got this old Crown Vic that was a New York City cab, someone bought it and drove it all the way down to Maryland, it turned into a Jimmy’s Blue Cab, engine dropped out, ended up going to the junk yard, I found it, it’s in excellent condition. The back is kind of torn up, but we can have the whole car for $350 bucks”. And I said “I just want the front clip”. He goes, “If you want the front clip he’ll cut it for you, deliver it to the shop and everything, for $300 bucks”. We did it. So we got this front clip, we took the whole car apart, we completely gutted it, and we had all the pieces laying there, power washed them, and then I sat down with a friend of mine who’s an engineer, and we came up with an idea of how to put the thing together. A third friend came in and said he’d be happy to weld the thing together. So I was kind of playing composer with this piece and I put together a really great team of craftsmen and engineers who know the stuff better than I do. Once we put the whole thing together I started actually ordering new pieces from Ford, getting the thing to look contemporary, as if it’s running now. It’s even wired, the headlights work. And then after that the magic began, which is all the painting. I went into the studio and just worked on it for a few weeks, and now the piece is complete.

Are you going to paint on the wall with it or will it just be the installed as is?

Initially the idea was that it was just going to be the front end just put up against the stark white wall. I like the idea of that: Is it a sculpture? Is it a car? Is it a piece of art? That whole conversation, that maybe as a formal element it should just sit on a white wall. The more I saw the show taking place and kind of growing and started thinking about how colors are going to relate and how the subject matter is going to communicate with each other, I thought that the transition might be a little too harsh with this piece, so my second thought was what if a wall painting merged with it? It doesn’t have to live exclusively with the piece, but something to make the piece mesh well with the space overall. And right now I’m kind of concepting some different ideas of how [the wall painting] is going to protrude out of the piece. The other thing I really wanted to be careful of is being clichéd. The idea of a car coming out of the wall, the first thing you’d hear the general public say is, “Oh, what are you going to paint, the rest of the car?”, so you have to just put all those thoughts aside and realize what works formally, so that was why I thought it would be really neat to incorporate the wall painting with the sculpture.

So do you consider that piece conceptually part of the whole?

Yes, even thought the piece is in this whole other medium and even though you’re bringing in the idea of the wall painting, you have two opposites meeting here, you have something that’s very solid, something that’s very permanent and heavy, and then something impermanent like a wall painting, that conversation is amazing, to throw that in the mix with all the gouache works, again you have this heavy topic that I treat in a very subtle way on a very soft surface, on paper, mind you, rather than on panel or canvas, so all of those things are very on purpose, I thought these things through, I had enough time to really think it through. I would not have put that here if I didn’t think it could live well with the other work. Thematically, yes, it’s a more direct conversation. With the taxi there are a whole bunch of other issues that are going to come into play conceptually. People look at that piece, if someone wants to get something out of the piece they’re going to get something different than maybe the Post Office truck painting; that I’m ready for.