This article first appeared in Options, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 23, 2019 - December 29, 2019

A mid-career retrospective at the national art gallery offers a rare opportunityto delve into the broad-ranging and multi-faceted oeuvre of Ahmad Fuad Osman. In a walk-through of the exhibition, Mae Chan attempts to probe the art, life and mind of the artist.

Ahmad Fuad Osman recalls his earliest encounter with art back home in rural Baling, Kedah. It was two paintings by his uncle that hung in his grandmother’s house. Fuad, as he is better known, was six or seven years old at the time. One of the paintings is part of his own collection today.

“My third brother, who is four years older than me, could draw quite well. I remember how he made a pencil drawing of Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio and stuck it on the wall of our wooden kampung house. That was my first experience of an exhibition, I guess. I thought then how cool that was and a kind of envious and brotherly rivalry slowly brewed in me, and I started to draw too. I also had a friend in school who could draw very well, much better than my brother,” he recounts.

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