Background
Born in 1969, Ahmad Fuad left his hometown of Baling, Kedah in 1987 to obtain a degree in Fine Arts degree at the then Intittute Teknologi MARA (now Universiti Teknologi MARA UiTM).
It was there that he met fellow artists Bayu Utomo, Hamir Soib, Ahmad Shukri and Masnor Ramli and formed the Matahati group. This artist collective has played a pivotal role in the careers of its members as well as in the development of Malaysian contemporary art.
As one of its founding members, Ahmad Fuad’s art remains true to the spirit of Matahati — exploring key socio-political issues and encouraging discourse without creative and conceptual constraints.
His work has found worldwide acclaim, exhibited in institutions such as the National Visual Art Gallery and Petronas Gallery Malaysia; Tacheles Berlin, Germany; The Seoul Metropolitan Art Museum, Korea; Singapore Art Museum; Gertrude Art Centre, Melbourne, Australia; Guangdong Museum of Art China; Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; Manes Gallery, Czech Republic; Red Mill Gallery, Vermont USA, and many other galleries and museums.
Throughout Ahmad Fuad’s career as artist, his interest has always been to communicate the multifaceted and subtleties of human conditions. His entire oeuvre revolves around the fundamental experiences of our existence. He is perpetually drawn to explore the situations that we face in getting along with the ’world’ and how these situations weigh upon us.
He is also intrigued by the irony in the contemporaneity of both most abject and most excessive lifestyle and quality of life of the people that he met, read or heard about. To Ahmad Fuad, constant negotiation between the “two forces” led by ecstasy and agony; hope and despair; spiritual and material; love and hate, transience and ambiguity; fortune and meager are what define us as human.
Majority of his works tended to be up close and personal encounters of his life and surroundings with these two forces. According to Ahmad Fuad, his encounters did not necessarily tell a story, at times, they are meant to evoke emotions and questions. He always believe that art has a capacity to help us to change, move, learn, grow, liberate, reflect, review, analyse, share and live.
In his own word the artist quipped,
“To me art is a journey like life itself. It is something transcient and must not set in black and white, cemented in, or immutable. Apart from my moral and religious uphold, I have never set any limitation or boundaries in the pursuit of creating art. I do not believe in single thought process, style, medium or material, over another. Art becomes a window through which I am given a freedom to get to know life, the world and its Creator.“