The Most Recent Hangings Of New Works At The Family House

At the home of The AFK Collection's founders Aliya and Farouk Khan, the only constant is change as narrated by Zena Khan following the most recent hangings of new works at the family house.

Since the mid-1990s, when Aliya and Farouk Khan moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, their interest in art and patronage of artists has coalesced into what is now formally known as The AFK Collection. Comprising over 1,000 unique artworks, many of these pieces represent the first generation of Malaysia's contemporary artists. Malaysian artists are one of the best in Southeast Asia, Farouk says. It says something about the period of the 1970s and 1980s in which this generation of artists lived, that they had deeper ideologies and sincerity than the current day when commercialization and materialism is rampant. To him, the art collection is important because it is a snapshot of the present time. History is the past and art is the present. Artists are expressing how the world is going and keeping in mind that they tend to use the right brain, the many ways in which they express themselves visually rather than literally makes it so interesting.

For his wife Aliya, who grew up in Pakistan, and Farouk, a Singaporean, coming to Malaysia and looking at it with fresh eyes, unsullied by the baggage of the Malaysian experience, made them realize how far ahead Malaysian artists were in their time. I'm not saying slightly ahead but way ahead and the proof is in the pudding as art prices in Malaysia have gone up 1,000 percent in the last two decades.