When Bani Abidi returned to this country in 2003 after studying for a master’s degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, she was anxious about the precarious position of her homeland. She wanted to make art that would address it, that would somehow speak to both Pakistanis and Americans about the way the United States, in her view, had pushed Pakistan into falling in line with the war on terror, regardless of the potential fallout.

Soon after, Ms. Abidi hired a traditional brass pipe band — a legacy of colonial days that is now thoroughly South Asian — and asked its members to play the most American song she could think of. The video that resulted, “Shan Pipe Band Learns the Star Spangled Banner” (2004), shows the musicians moving through a sputtering though good-natured cacophony of squeaky notes — a seven-minute anthem to the discordant alliance between the two countries.

Ms. Abidi has since become a well-known artist at home and, in some circles, abroad (another of her videos, about the pompous behavior of some Pakistani politicians, was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan), and her Shan Pipe Band piece is now on prominent display in “Hanging Fire,” the first large-scale American survey of contemporary Pakistani art, at Asia Society in New York through Jan. 3. Like most of the show’s artworks — there are 55, by a total of 15 artists — it embodies a deep engagement with the politics and culture of Pakistan and a worldly, provocative and often humorous approach to art that few in the West would associate with this troubled country.

In fact, though, the works on view in New York seem a fair representation of the spirit and sensibilities animating the increasingly vibrant contemporary-art scene that gave rise to “Hanging Fire.” That scene, barely visible a generation ago, has been fed in recent years by a surge of newly rich collectors and a proliferation of private galleries that offer the work of Pakistani painters, sculptors and video and installation artists — whose own ranks have grown as existing art-education programs have expanded and new ones have cropped up around the country.

The main centers of new art in Pakistan are its two largest cities, Karachi and Lahore. Karachi, on the Arabian Sea, is the country’s financial and media capital, brash and cosmopolitan (and violent). In the last 60 years it has grown from a city of fewer than a half-million residents to one of the 20 largest cities in the word, with a population of about 17 million. It is also home to the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, an upstart institution founded in 1989, after the death of the military dictator Zia ul-Haq; the school’s creation signaled the end of a dark era when art galleries hid works with any content critical of the state.

Across the country, Lahore, despite its 10 million people, feels relatively sedate. A hub of South Asian artistic and intellectual life for centuries, it is still widely seen as the cultural center of Pakistan. It is home to the country’s leading art school, the National College of Arts, founded as the Mayo School of Arts in the 1880s by John Lockwood Kipling, a British painter, sculptor and the father of Rudyard Kipling. It attracts students from all over Pakistan (the warring tribal area, too) and a prestigious roster of teachers. The college is known for its classes in the exacting technique of miniature painting favored in Mughal times, adapted to modern themes — a popular genre that many contemporary artists have disdained as sell-out art.

A Karachi artist represented in the Asia Society show, Naiza Khan, works in an unusual, somewhat oblique feminist vein out of a light-filled studio on the top floor of the family home in the upper-middle-class Defense Housing Authority neighborhood. Shiny metal sculptures of women’s corsets, camisoles and skirts fill the room. Her contribution to “Hanging Fire” includes a red suede and steel piece called “Spine” (2008) modeled on restrictive South Asian female underwear of the early 20th century.

Like so much Pakistani contemporary art, Ms. Khan’s work is influenced by the country’s often toxic mix of religion and politics. She had long worked on themes of the female body and attire, and was inspired to begin making female armor, she said, when militant Islamic women dressed in black burqas and defiantly wielding long sticks were shown on television as the defenders of a radical mosque, known as Lal Masjid, in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

“At Lal Masjid, for the first time one saw a seemingly strong women’s force,” Ms. Khan said of the mid-2007 incident that resulted in the storming of the mosque by the military and the deaths of more than 80 people.

Some of her pieces, like the armored skirt, are a takeoff on the chastity belt. “Spine” was based on a backless bustier made in fuchsia silk and gold embroidery, an heirloom of a friend. Ms. Khan found the scarlet suede that covers it under a pile of leather scraps at a Karachi factory that manufactures bulletproof vests. She then persuaded a shoemaker to come to her tree-filled courtyard, where he worked alongside a welder: galvanized steel was fashioned into the rounded shapes at the top of the piece by the welder, then the shoemaker painstakingly stitched the suede over the steel.

Radical art is being made in Lahore, too. Anwar Saeed, a professor at the National College of Arts, works in a very different studio atmosphere from Ms. Khan’s: a small, excruciatingly spare room on the third floor of a walkup in the city’s old town. An old-fashioned transistor radio sits on his desk in front of the window, a neat line of pencils alongside suggesting the Lahori devotion to craft.

Mr. Saeed’s large acrylics on canvas are a far cry from the traditionalism with which his employer is identified. Often painted in bright hues reminiscent of Gauguin, they dwell on the conflict of longing and the impossibility of its realization, on sex and death. In the Asia Society show, visitors can leaf through a visual notebook by Mr. Saeed titled “A Book of Imaginary Companions,” in which he has painted lewd, funny images of men onto the pages of a published book called “I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual.” “Pierre” is an English translation of the true story of a gay Frenchman who was betrayed by a lover, sent to a concentration camp by the Germans during World War II, and lived to tell his experiences.

“It was a book about pain and torture, so I thought I should make images of pleasure,” Mr. Saeed said. He describes his images, some of recognizable Pakistani actors and singers, as “something close to pornography, playful, completely enjoyable.”

There are still plenty of limits here. The book could never be shown in Pakistan, where homosexuality is recognized as a part of life in many extended families, but is barely accepted in public discourse, Mr. Saeed said.

“No one would have the courage to show it here — it’s too explicit,” he said, adding that he had recently sold a large acrylic with explicit homosexual imagery to a well-to-do young collector who will hang it in his Karachi home.

In India, where homosexuality is more accepted in art and the media than in Pakistan, a Mumbai gallery recently selected 14 pages for an exhibition. “The safer ones,” Mr. Saeed said wryly.

{Source: nytimes.com}