For months, my world had revolved around paintings. Some hung in my room. Others existed only in my imagination. I wandered through exhibitions in Dhaka, studied the work of other artists, and spent long hours thinking about what I might create next.
Art had become more than something I practised. It was increasingly how I understood the world. Then, one day, Lutfa Mahmuda apu called. She wanted me to participate in an international art exhibition in Perak, Malaysia.
I had met her only months earlier through Sheila apu, whose encouragement and generosity had already shaped much of my journey as an artist. These relationships mattered.
In a world where artistic careers often seem to depend on institutions, reputations and carefully cultivated networks, mine had grown through the kindness of people who believed in my work.
Lutfa apu asked me to send photographs of my paintings. I sent them, uncertain what would happen next.
Two were selected.
The exhibition, Merdeka: Jiwa Yang Bebas—a celebration of the free spirit—brought together artists from several countries to explore artistic expression, cultural diversity and freedom.
Hosted by Galeri Al-Biruni at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), it was a four-day gathering of artists whose backgrounds and artistic traditions differed considerably.
So, I was going to Malaysia! The excitement came with unease. I had travelled before, but this journey felt different. I was not going merely to see another country. I was going as an artist, carrying two paintings into a world of people whose work I had yet to encounter.
On the morning of my departure, I said goodbye to my husband. His contribution to my artistic ambitions has been enormous, though much of it has taken the quiet form of encouragement, patience and faith in something that does not always promise certainty.
By the time I landed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, it was midnight.
Professor Hafiz and a group of teachers from UiTM were waiting with a bus. I had expected the exhaustion of a late-night arrival in an unfamiliar country. Instead, their warmth made the tiredness disappear almost immediately.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant to wait for a delegation of Indonesian artists. Once they arrived, we began the four-hour journey to Perak.
It was my first introduction to a country whose landscapes would become inseparable from my memories of its people.
Perak was green, clean and remarkably quiet. Trees and hills seemed to occupy more space than buildings. Coming from Dhaka, a city where people appear to fill every available corner, I was struck by the absence of crowds. The landscape seemed to have room to breathe.
We were accommodated at the university guesthouse. There, I met my roommate, Moya Kamaruddin, an Indonesian artist who would become one of the most important people in my brief Malaysian life.
Our schedule was demanding. Each morning began around seven, followed by breakfast in the dining room. Almost every day, we were served rice noodles with eggs.
Of all the elaborate meals I would eat during the trip, this simple breakfast became my favourite. It was also where the strangers around me began acquiring names, personalities and stories.
There was Professor Hafiz, whose hospitality never seemed to tire. There were Indonesian artists Supriatna, Dr Tri Karyono, Dede Comex and Sarnadi Adam. They were accomplished artists, but their accomplishments did not announce themselves through grand gestures. They were relaxed, generous and easy to talk to.
Something else struck me. Their manner carried a quiet sense of Muslim hospitality that felt familiar without being identical to what I knew at home. It appeared in small courtesies, in their gentleness with one another, and in the ease with which they welcomed someone from another country.
I found it difficult to explain. Perhaps the most meaningful forms of cultural recognition are often the hardest to describe.
Our first day took us around the university. Young teachers guided us through the campus, introducing us to its spaces and surroundings. The landscape was lush, the architecture framed by hills and greenery.
After lunch, we travelled to the home and studio of Malaysian artist Zainon Abdullah. His house was unlike any artist's home I had visited.
Plants occupied corners and open spaces. Water moved through the property. Fish swam in ponds. Wood, foliage and paintings existed together without competing for attention.
The house seemed less like a building containing artworks than a living composition in which the artworks had found their natural place.
Zainon welcomed us with traditional food and invited us to explore.
I wandered through the rooms, looking at the paintings, the arrangements of objects, the relationship between the interiors and the garden. Nothing seemed excessive. The beauty came from restraint, from an understanding that an artist's surroundings could be an extension of artistic thought.
Before we left, he gave each of us a copy of his personal catalogue. For an artist, such a gift carries a particular value. A catalogue is not simply a collection of images. It is a record of how another person has spent years looking at the world.
That evening, Moya and I returned to the guesthouse. By then, something unexpected was happening between us.
We came from different countries, spoke different languages and belonged to different generations. Yet none of these differences seemed especially important. Each night, we sat on the balcony and talked. Sometimes about art.
Sometimes about our lives. Sometimes about things that had little to do with either. Friendship was developing without either of us having to work particularly hard at it.
The university guesthouse, which had initially felt like temporary accommodation, was beginning to feel like home.
The following morning, a minibus took us to Galeri Al-Biruni, inside the university campus.
The teachers welcomed us for a discussion session and an informal sketching programme. I chose a small pond as my subject. Around me, artists worked with a confidence and fluency that I found absorbing.
There is something humbling about watching another artist draw. A familiar object becomes unfamiliar through someone else's attention. A line that might never have occurred to you suddenly seems inevitable.
I watched, sketched and learned. Later, I walked alone around the campus.
The university stood amid hills, its buildings surrounded by a landscape of green slopes and distant mountains. There was a gentleness to the place, reinforced by the people I had met.
I felt an unexpected calm.
Perhaps travel does this when we are fortunate. It takes us away from the routines that define our lives and allows us to notice feelings we have learned to ignore. Walking through that Malaysian campus, I felt as though something inside me was being quietly repaired.
I had not even known it needed repairing. That evening was the opening of our exhibition.
Moya and I dressed for the occasion and boarded the minibus once again. When we arrived at Galeri Al-Biruni, the atmosphere had changed. The quiet gallery of the morning was now filled with lights, food, guests and conversation.
And there, among the works of artists from several countries, were my two paintings. I stood before them for a while.
It was a strange sensation. These were works that had begun in the privacy of my room in Dhaka. I knew the decisions behind their colours, the uncertainties that had accompanied their making, the hours I had spent looking at them and wondering whether they were finished.
Now they belonged, temporarily, to a public space in another country. People I had never met were looking at them, perhaps finding meanings I had never intended.
That, I realised, is one of the peculiar pleasures of exhibiting art. Once a painting leaves the studio, it begins a life independent of its maker.
We took photographs beside our works. Distinguished guests arrived. There were short speeches, conversations and the formal presentation of certificates and souvenirs.
Dinner introduced me to another unfamiliar ritual. The food was arranged on a large rotating circular tray at the centre of the table. To reach a dish, one simply turned the tray until it arrived.
It was an elegant little invention for communal dining. No one needed to stretch across the table. The food travelled between us. I tasted dishes I could not always identify. Most were delicious.
But the real discovery came when I began walking through the exhibition. The Malaysian and Indonesian paintings drew my attention immediately.
Their colours were startling.
There were intense reds, deep blues, luminous greens and combinations of saturated tones that seemed to resist the muted palettes I had often encountered elsewhere. The paintings possessed an energy that was at once decorative, expressive and deeply assured.
I had come from Bangladesh with my own visual vocabulary, shaped by the artists and exhibitions I knew. Here was another vocabulary, one that seemed to embrace colour with extraordinary confidence.
Of course, no single exhibition can represent the art of two countries. Malaysia and Indonesia contain numerous artistic traditions, influences and disagreements. Yet what I saw that evening challenged my assumptions about how colour could operate within a painting.
It was not merely a matter of brightness. Colour seemed to carry memory, geography and cultural temperament.
I began wondering how much of an artist's imagination comes from the landscape in which they grow up. How much is inherited from local traditions? And how much is a deliberate rejection of them?
I did not have answers. But I had acquired new questions, which may be the more valuable gift. The following day, we said goodbye to Perak.
Before leaving the region, we visited PORT, short for People of Remarkable Talents, a cultural centre devoted to supporting artistic and creative work.
Its general manager, Nur Hanim, guided us through the centre and explained its activities and contribution to the local arts community.
What interested me was the sense that art was being treated not simply as an individual pursuit but as part of a wider cultural ecosystem. Artists need studios and galleries, certainly. But they also need places where ideas circulate, collaborations begin and creative work becomes part of public life.
PORT offered a glimpse of such a space.
Lunch brought more discoveries, including pineapple curry, a dish unfamiliar to me. The combination was unexpected, but the freshness and balance of flavours made it memorable.
Then we boarded the bus for Kuala Lumpur. The journey remains one of my clearest memories of Malaysia.
Mountains rose beside the road. The sky opened above long stretches of green. At times, the landscape appeared almost composed, as though the hills had been arranged with an artist's understanding of proportion and distance.
I watched through the window, reluctant to look away.
We spent the night at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur. The following day brought another exhibition, this time at ASWARA, Malaysia's National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage.
There were paintings by artists from different parts of the world. I moved from one work to another with the appetite of someone who had discovered a new language and wanted to learn every word.
I wanted to absorb everything: the compositions, the surfaces, the techniques, the unfamiliar choices of colour and form.
But it was also my last day.
Soon, I had to say goodbye to the artists and hosts who had made the journey possible. We exchanged invitations. They asked me to visit their countries. I asked them to come to Dhaka.
These are familiar gestures at international gatherings. Often, they remain polite promises. Yet this time, the invitations felt different.
In only a few days, people who had been strangers had become companions. We had shared meals, studied one another's paintings, travelled through unfamiliar landscapes and spent evenings talking about our lives.
Art had brought us together, but something beyond art had sustained those connections.
On the journey home, I thought about the two paintings that had taken me to Malaysia.
Before leaving Dhaka, I had imagined the exhibition as an opportunity to show my work to an international audience. That had seemed important enough. What I had not anticipated was how much I would receive in return.
I met artists whose use of colour challenged my own habits. I had seen homes where painting and nature existed in quiet harmony. I had discovered institutions working to create spaces for artistic exchange. I had found friendship across differences of language, age and nationality.
And I had experienced the curious freedom of being somewhere unfamiliar while feeling unexpectedly understood.
--
Sabiha Nahla is a aspiring painter