Curatorial Review
by Oleksandr Dyvnich
Hazem Asif, the Lahore-based illustrator and graphic designer behind the studio moniker worldofhazem, works in a register that sits somewhere between retro-futurist poster art and speculative urban cartography. Across the five pieces gathered here — Cyberlahore, Desi Alien Attack, New Doha, The Lost City of Kites, and Truck and the Beanstalk — a consistent visual philosophy emerges: the South Asian and Gulf city is not a backdrop to be rendered faithfully, but a living organism to be exaggerated, layered, and reimagined until it tells its own science-fiction folk tale.
Hazem Asif | Cyberlahore
Composition and Density
Asif’s strongest structural habit is architectural stacking. In Cyberlahore and The Lost City of Kites, domes, minarets, and rooftops are piled into a single vertical mass, closer to a geological cross-section than a skyline. This density rewards close, patient looking — a shopfront sign, a Coca-Cola advertisement, a rickshaw driver, a newspaper headline all compete for attention within the frame. The risk of such maximalism is visual fatigue, yet Asif largely avoids it by anchoring each composition around a dominant silhouette (a mosque dome, a floating fortress, a skyline crowned by a giant title) that gives the eye a resting point before it is invited back into the detail.
Hazem Asif | The Lost City of Kites
Colour and AtmosphereColour does the narrative heavy lifting in this body of work. Cyberlahore’s dusk palette of rose, violet, and ember reads as nostalgic and slightly melancholic, appropriate to its news-ticker subtext of inflation and unrest. Desi Alien Attack inverts this warmth entirely, plunging the same architectural vocabulary into acid greens lit by a tractor-beam gradient that is the picture’s clear focal device. New Doha, by contrast, is the most conventionally ‘poster-like’ of the set, its citrus sunset and search-light beams recalling mid-century travel illustration more than speculative fiction. This range demonstrates real fluency, though it also means the body of work reads as a set of palette experiments rather than a unified series — a deliberate choice, perhaps, but one that slightly dilutes the cumulative impact of the ‘Truckistan’ world-building project these images are drawn from.
Hazem Asif | Desi Alien Attack
Narrative and Craft
The strongest works here are the ones that commit to a single clear event rather than general atmosphere. Desi Alien Attack succeeds because its premise — a flying rickshaw caught in an abduction beam over a familiar skyline — is legible in an instant and rewards a second look for its wit. Truck and the Beanstalk, the most painterly and least architectural piece in the set, is a departure worth noting: its collapsed, vine-swallowed truck has a quieter, more elegiac tone, and its looser brushwork suggests Asif is capable of restraint as well as spectacle. New Doha is the weakest of the five on these terms; its typographic title and travel-poster staging feel more like commercial signage than storytelling, and the human figures in the foreground are comparatively generic compared to the specificity found elsewhere in the artist’s crowd scenes.
Hazem Asif | Truck and the Beanstalk
Verdict
Taken together, this selection confirms Asif as a distinctive voice in speculative South Asian illustration — an artist unafraid of density, colour extremity, and cultural specificity. The work is at its best when a single strong idea anchors the maximalism (the alien beam, the beanstalk-truck); it is at its weakest when decorative flourish substitutes for a clear hook. Future work would benefit from more of the restraint glimpsed in Truck and the Beanstalk, paired with the fearless colour and density that already define Cyberlahore and Desi Alien Attack.
Hazem Asif | New Doha
