I was born in the Middle East and currently live in Istanbul, a city where the legacies of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire are in their death throes, where the ugly war between the modern world and a past world—real but long gone—is still being fought. The sketchbooks I have filled likely remember the moment I first encountered art, light, and colors better than I do.
Spending time drawing quickly led me to study anatomy, work on it, and accept the reality that art can never be abstracted from technique. Over the years, I have dedicated myself to technical training, resisting everything lacking knowledge and insight, and following many artists, constantly reminded that there is no limit to learning.
For a long period, my drawings were heavily influenced by the anime I watched, and like every classic anime novice, I created fan art for Death Note and Bleach, re-stylizing the characters. Caricaturing—or in a more modern and refined sense, stylizing—is an incredibly challenging process that demands immense technical skill. It is about reshaping a form without compromising its essence, requiring an insight deep enough to grasp the emotions and meaning of the redefined subject. This process of reinterpreting and reshaping forms is, perhaps, the sharpest defining aspect of art itself. In the characters I create, one can witness this ongoing reinterpretation.
Beyond all this, I acknowledge the importance of being transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary—something that Western capitalists, who have long marketed the necessity of specialization, have only recently come to understand. For me, 3D art holds a significant place in my life. While I never underestimate the miraculous effect of creating depth on paper, bringing an environment into a three-dimensional existence and allowing a camera to navigate through it grants me the experience of seeing and redefining art in a whole new way.
Perhaps people will not fully grasp for a long time how much meaning seeps into the art created by someone who has lived through such experiences. Just as younger generations, exposed to ever-higher dynamic range films and the reckless speed of social media, search for something crucial without even knowing what they have lost, the devaluation of creative production through AI and Web 4.0 may eventually disturb some of us again.
For this reason, I continue my art—a reflection of my mind and life—built through music, painting, and the complex order of the characters I have created. It is an order that resembles either the structured battlefield every soldier envisions or the chaotic spectacle of a circus, as every child imagines.
Muhammad Zeinal