One of Malaysia’s preeminent Realist artists—Ahmad Zakii Anwar—returns to Valentine Willie Fine Art with his latest charcoal series, Kota Sepi. Compelling and meditative, Zakii’s nine black and white drawings offer insights into the mysteries of the human figure within the spaces of Malaysia’s urban environment.

Developing from his previous exhibition Kota Sunyi, Kota Sepi too offers a cast of characters from Zakii’s cinema of the everyday. Whether in coffee shop interiors or street scenes, each figure takes on their own formal significance through Zakii’s brand of iconic Realism. Their intentions however, are subject to wide interpretation. Passive, active, heroic or clandestine, audiences can only guess at the personalities and hidden exchanges taking place. Such silence emphasises, the isolation of each character –the ‘loneliness’ suggested in the Bahasa title of the exhibition—that hint at various questions unanswered or words left unsaid.

Memorable quotations from the artist’s past works, as well as familiar scenes from the Malaysian landscape do however, encourage potential narratives, but the artist’s dramas nevertheless remain firmly ambiguous. It is this objective to reveal and conceal as well as his interest in the secrets of the human condition that make Zakii one the country’s most accessible and acclaimed artists working today.