It has taken 18 years for Ahmad Zakii Anwar, known for his large-scale, photo-realistic charcoal drawings, to return to a sizeable gallery space – giving a wider public the opportunity to see a substantial body of his work gathered in one place.
In 2008, Galeri PETRONAS in Kuala Lumpur presented Disclosure, a survey of the first two decades of his career featuring more than 100 works.
Now, the 71-year-old Johor-born artist takes over the GDP Campus gallery in Bukit Damansara with Sementara, a retrospective drawn from the Steve Wong Art Collection (SWAC).
Opening this Sunday (Oct 11), the exhibition runs through Jan 10, 2027.
Designed and curated by R+, GDP’s design research team, Sementara brings together more than 75 works from Wong’s collection. Regarded as one of the nation’s prominent art collectors, Wong has collected Zakii’s work since the early 1990s, building a relationship that has developed from collector-artist ties into a close friendship.
The exhibition spans works from 1995 to 2013, offering art enthusiasts a closer look at the different phases of Zakii’s artistic development.
More than 20 works from Wong’s collection were also loaned to Galeri PETRONAS' Disclosure in 2008, underscoring his longstanding commitment to Zakii’s work.
The scope of Sementara
GDP Campus, an eight-storey office building and headquarters of GDP Architects, also houses gallery spaces for art and architecture exhibitions. Sementara aims to broaden the gallery’s reach by bringing both Zakii’s work and the venue to a larger audience.
It is a collector-led undertaking initiated by Wong, with the entire fourth floor of GDP Campus dedicated to the exhibition. Organised into 10 categories, including Meditation, Smokers and B&W Portraits, the exhibition gives visitors the space to wander at their own pace, with Zakii’s works hung salon-style across the expansive gallery.
"Zakii’s compositions, from brushwork to charcoal, are evidence of how much can be revealed when we pay attention to something before it changes: A banana’s curve; a vessel’s solitude; a city falling silent around a lone figure. For nothing remains exactly as it is; perhaps that is precisely the point. His paintings give things significance not by making them permanent, but by paying close attention to their current form," outlines Sementara's curatorial statement.
As much as Sementara is an exhibition about art collecting and Zakii’s career, it also reflects how far the Malaysian art scene has moved beyond the boundaries that once defined it.
Zakii’s own trajectory is telling. He started out as a graphic artist in advertising before moving into fine art – a career progression that may seem natural today, in an art scene less shackled by the old distinctions between commercial and fine art.
In the 1990s, however, the two worlds were more clearly separated. Zakii crossed that divide and became a major influence on figurative realism in contemporary Malaysian art, making him a timely subject for an exhibition of this scale, particularly as a new generation discovers his work, including pieces seldom seen in public.
Sementara, a ticketed exhibition, will feature guided tours and supporting programmes through January 2027, giving visitors greater context for Zakii’s work and practice.
Wong began collaborating with GDP Campus in 2024 with Not Just In Black And White, his first collector exhibition of Malaysian and regional artists, followed by the more compact Memory’s Landscape earlier this year.
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