Haider Ali dabs a brush with an iridescent glob of paint and gets to work on a pair of sparkling white trainers — his latest canvas for a carnival of color celebrating Pakistani culture.
Pakistan’s trucks are renowned for “truck art”: candy-colored murals depicting South Asian animals, celebrities and religious icons.
The tradition transforms the highways and cities into kaleidoscopic processions.
Photo: AFP
And now Ali — a veteran truck artist — has transposed the painting onto sneakers.
“A client came to me from the US asking me to paint shoes,” he said. “I told him an exorbitant fee to discourage him, but he agreed, so I decided to get on with it.”
He works on each pair for up to four days, charging select clients US$400 for a set featuring bespoke patterns and motifs.
Since he started painting trainers in January, he has dispatched eight pairs — to places in Pakistan and abroad — with new orders arriving every four days after a surge of social media interest.
“The ideas keep coming to me,” the 42-year-old said. “It’s in human nature to decorate ourselves and the things around us.”
Cross-legged in his Karachi rooftop studio, he flips a pair of high-top Nikes to reveal the image of a luminous pink hawk and a gazing yellow eye, framed by hypnotic bulbous fringes.
Another pair ready for shipping bears a shimmering peacock.
Some say that the practice of adorning trucks began in the 1940s when hauliers crafted vibrant logos communicating their brand identity to a largely illiterate public.
Others say that the artistic contest began with bus drivers vying to lure passengers.
Today, the trade is one of Pakistan’s most famous cultural exports.
Ali comes from a family of truck artists who eked out a living at the roadside yards where drivers eagerly surrender slim pay packets to decorate their vehicles.
Strolling through the Yusuf Goth truck yard, his tinted glasses and slight swagger lend him an air of celebrity.
“I get in the zone when I feel a connection to the art,” he said. “If I pause, the ideas stop flowing.”
He came to fame outside Pakistan when his work was exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington in 2002, helping him hone a reputation as an international ambassador for truck art.
He has applied his craft to a plane, a Volkswagen Beetle and even a woman’s body at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Ali’s cottage industry offers numerous advantages. He is stowed away from the din of the roadside yards, and his fashion clients give him full creative freedom, unlike truck drivers who peer over his shoulder.
However, as with trucks, the decoration on shoes will not last forever.
After three or four years, it will chafe, crack and fade — offering a fresh canvas for yet more artwork.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS