How three emerging artists are reinterpreting South Asia

What power do images have to remain with us today amidst a constant bombardment of visuality in our everyday lives, and how can they provoke us about subjective realities in postcolonial South Asia? It might look unlikely but 30-year-old Yash Sheth, 24-year-old Gurdev Singh, and 27-year-old Laisul Hoque’s studios bubble with similar questions even as they churn out very different creative and lens-based practices living in Delhi, Mumbai, and London, respectively. 

Sheth treats photographs like his diary, dispatching from a club in Lower Parel to a fishman’s village in Dharavi Island, coded within his particular flavour of humour. Singh scours disobedient images in his family archive while maintaining a renegade practice, constantly reinterpreting the image of the good Sikh boy. Hoque too turns towards his family photographs—particularly treating his own memory as an archive—and wanting others to walk into distilled images with a strong affective marker. 

Handpicked by Bazaar India, we walk into the studios of these three emerging artists, delving deeper into their practice, how they see the world around them, and what matters to them the most.

YASH SHETH 

Yash Sheth isn’t a funny guy—or rather, he doesn’t think he is funny at all. The photographer had just returned from a shoot, and we were looking at a photo he had taken during Christmas in Uttan village of Dharavi Island, where two blindfolded women smiled as they crouched down, looking for something on the ground—beside them a duck had reared its long neck, as if also a furry participant in the game. “It’s hard to describe how these funny things occur in my photos,” muses an incredulous Sheth when I laugh. “I am a serious guy.” 

But that’s also how Mumbai is, he chuckles, a city brimming with eccentricities whose bylanes Sheth finds himself plodding with his camera from dawn till the late hours of the night, no destination in mind. “I was initially drawn towards The Gateway of India and Haji Ali,” he says. “Then I thought Mumbai can’t just be these places—now I get down at any station and start walking.” Looking at multiple hands pulling at a cow’s bridle before a bull race in rural Maharashtra, as it smacks its large tongue, licking the milk from its lips, it feels like sitting on a rollercoaster and seeing everything all at once—it’s an overstimulating view of the margins of an already dizzying city that Sheth is fond of, and he agrees. “I want everything to be in my frame,” he confesses. “That’s also my relationship with Mumbai, as since my birth, what I’ve seen around me is crowd and chaos. Which is also why I like seeing how Sudhir Patwardhan paints a congested Bombay.”

Although the city doesn’t sleep, it does get quiet in the wee hours of the night, which is also when Sheth steps out with a bunch of people, leading nightly photowalks till the sun hits the horizon. “The only way to know a city and document it is by walking,” affirms the photographer who prefers to keep his style simply defined as documentary, although it is much more than that, tinged with his particular tone of sardonic urban humour. It was while walking along the coastal line of Colaba to Arnala that he came across koliwadas or traditional fishing villages, where he developed a special relationship with the village of Uttan. 

Here, he was fascinated by the contrasting kitsch of everyday life, like a bunch of fish hung out for drying before a hand-painted crucifixion cross on the walls of a building—poking us in the ribs on the double entendre around death. That’s where he shot the blindfolded women playing games during Christmas week. “They speak Marathi, and my Marathi is a bit weak,” he says. 

“They laugh over it, but like that, I’m trying to embrace something of theirs. Everyone in that village knows me, and I go to their weddings—which I love documenting, as you can see the socio-political issues.” 

Unlike any photograph ever included in a wedding album, Sheth turns away from the bride and groom towards moments of quietness, like a young girl tiptoeing in her ballet shoes as she glances at the wedding band from her roof or the bride’s friends laughing as the former gets her make-up done. This quietness is captured in the main city, particularly during the monsoon, somehow strangely peaceful in the blue tint of Sheth’s camera, even as streets overflow with water and smiling office-goers who have resigned themselves to their fate. “Somehow the city becomes more poetic,” he muses. 

Mumbai is ever changing and a decade later nothing might remain the same—that’s where he finds his work’s worth. “At least, the future generation would know what Uttan looked like,” says the photographer who had found himself amid a sea of change after suddenly buying a camera in his final years of engineering. “I would Google how to learn photography," he recalls.

GURDEV SINGH 

Early on in our conversation, Singh brings up Khushwant Singh as an inspiration, “He was outspoken and reckless as a Sikh man,” he says. “The community was critical but it’s a similar freedom that I am moving towards in my practice.” Sitting in his studio in Delhi, he pulls out a sheaf of family photographs where his father and uncles cross-dress as sardarnis with dupattas across their faces. He sends me his zine the day after we speak, where faces from his family photographs swim about as some aunty stares disapprovingly at his mother feeding his father, captured in a rare act of familial intimacy. It’s like tracing a lineage of Sikh rebellion. 

It’s a signature saucy cheekiness when he collages a postcard-sized portrait of his face on the cover of the once sought-after book Hot Dudes Reading and smirks when I ask him about it. “Have you seen the recent car culture trend in Punjab where the ones being deported are attaching stickers saying, ‘Deported from America’?” he laughs. It was difficult, he admits, being one among a handful of Sikh kids in school, the rest of whom were all aping hairstyles from the latest Shah Rukh or Salman Khan release. This tension is reflected in one of his paintings where a Sikh boy rues to another that he doesn’t look like Tom Cruise. It doesn’t matter, the latter replies. This angst is heavily layered when he sticks his mug on another New York man. “It’s like, can someone who looks like me, be on that magazine’s cover?” he asks. 

When Singh was presenting his postgraduation thesis earlier this year at Shiv Nadar University, his professors asked him about his shapeshifting practice where sometimes he’s a performer, frequently a photographer, and then a painter. “For me, it’s the business of images,” he says, adding he’s particularly fascinated by their circulation—which is why he “borrows” images from mainstream media, transforming them with his pinch of satire. A few months ago, his mixed media work, Doomscrolling, hung on the walls of Method Gallery—where a member of the Patiala Royal family signed a document in a psychedelic shirt added by Singh, as Gandhi looked on in flashy gold glasses.

Perhaps one work which everyone remembers most, he muses, is of Sikh couples kissing. “Actors from the community often have a no kissing policy,” he says. “One day I was going through my family’s archive and found that my uncle had so many photos from his honeymoon in 1986 where he and his wife kissed against the backdrop of every place they visited. That work was inspired by them.” In an attempt to find an alternate image of Sikh masculinity, he often returns to his family photos searching for tenderness, intimacy, and young renegades like a jovial photograph of young sardars sprawling around a cramped bed with one foot on someone else’s stomach.

Seeing Singh walking down Daryaganj in high-waisted brown trousers and puffy-sleeve white shirts almost makes it look as if he’s stepped out of the 80s. “I am quite inspired by Indian uncle fashion,” shares the artist who just walked for Rkive City at Lakme Fashion Week. “The world of safari suits and tailored pants.” This self-fashioning transfers onto the figure of “February Kumar” that he’s created as part of his online performative practice. “February Kumar is youthful and charming,” he smiles. “He’s obsessed with flamboyance in a performative world. He doesn’t have money, but he still lives like a king—I call him the middle-class maharaja.” 

It’s a kitschy world that February Kumar lives in, garlanded in wedding money garlands that Singh would find in alums or being a sporty Sikh boy complete in white socks, which almost seems like he’s adhering to all stereotypes of Sikh manhood, but that’s exactly what he wants us to think, subtly inserting unseriousness through socks printed with the Sprite logo. Singh too is surrounded by absurdist Delhi kitsch like a plastic aeroplane attached high on his studio wall or making baby Sikh labubus after the rise of the bratty charm online. He was buying commercial magazines before we spoke. “My collages are made from them,” he says. “My practice is a lot of playing around—like when I did my MFA showcase in a lift!”

LAISUL HOQUE

It’s a picture of surprise at Whitechapel Gallery as curious museum-goers emerge onto a dimly lit makeshift sweet shop in the middle of the dark gallery, which had been stocked with bhujiya and boondia—two snacks many of us growing up as children in India were encouraged to eat together. This is Laisul Hoque’s first emotional memory with his father—the only one he can think of—and he wanted others to walk into this memory and carry it forward with them as they tasted a bit of his hometown, Bangladesh, in London. 

“I technically ran away from my parents,” laughs Hoque. “I started studying literature without telling them, as they had enrolled me into engineering. After my Bachelor’s, I told them ‘hey look, this thing you paid for, I didn’t study! But I have this Master’s opportunity to study at Central Saint Martin’s, and I have my finances arranged—so, I’m going’.”

(Top) An Ode to All the Flavours, Nunnery Gallery as part of East London Art Prize, 2024. Photo credit: Rob Harris; (Above) An Ode to All the Flavours, Whitechapel Gallery, 2024. Photo credit: Fatima Yasmin

Half a decade later he feels that the university’s Contemporary Photography, Practices and Philosophies course was the best way he could have stepped into the arts. “It challenged you to imagine photography in nontraditional ways,” he adds. “I see it in an expanded image-making way where I am often wondering, how do I make people walk into an image?” That’s what he did at Whitechapel with An Ode to All The Flavours, honing into the singular visual of the roadside sweet shop lodged in his memory, tinged in the nostalgic mustard yellow of sodium bulbs flickering at night. His practice turns multidisciplinary as he deconstructs images and relooks at them by building them back through alternate mediums like installation.

The exhibition had its premiere at the Bengali arts and culture space—Kobi Nazrul Centre—near Brick Lane. “I collaborated with Bengali snack shops in Brick Lane and made the owners try the snack combination while trying to relive that moment with my father,” he says. His difficult relationship with his father came up during their conversation and he smiles as he recalls Bengali shopkeepers trying to console him about the problem of men expressing affection in strange ways. “It almost filled the silence of the failure to communicate with my father,” he notes. “I thought visitors could also have such conversations in the gallery sparked by snacks my father loves. Our culinary practices exist in a bubble, in sweet shops where it’s just the community who walks in. What happens when I try to bring it to a public gallery and open them to a wider audience?”

Hoque is fascinated by how artists like Sohrab Hura turned his lens inwards capturing his mother or Tehranborn Abbas Akhavan references occurrences in the Middle East while being diasporic. “Though those I felt seen in terms of currently being in the UK and having to experience political upheaval in Bangladesh just through images,” he says. “Images thus became a way for me to cope with that feeling.” Blurry footages of his father’s first trip to Europe 20 years ago, blazed above Piccadilly Circus from his short film The Purpose was to Document the Other Side when he was a CIRCA Prize finalist last year.

In the short, Hoque’s voice points out the Big Ben to his mother when she visits him in London. “Every generation has a different archive and ours is sitting around in camcorders and corrupted hard drives,” he says. “I was wondering what will happen to my archive and recalled how we grew up watching my father’s journey on his camera. Asking my mother to make a film in the same camera was a way to complete the arc and record our history so it doesn’t get lost in the messiness of dilapidated digital objects.” His mother’s disembodied voice floats over us as she recalls the difficulty of starting a family when she was young. “The camera is good at creating otherness,” says Hoque. “I wanted people to walk into my perspective and have empathy.” 

He is about to get his own studio for the first time and start preparing for his upcoming exhibition in February with Bow Arts. He is looking at his family photo archive and thinking of moments of illness in his family which coincided with national strife—this exhibition will also take place right before the Bangladesh elections. “I’m cautious of producing things,” he laughs. “As you can tell, I’ve spent a year making one work! I exist in between two countries and borders, and it has made me geared towards making things that are more ephemeral, in a sense.”

Lead image: Yash Sheth

Inside images: Gurdev Singh, Laisul Hoque, Rob Harris, Fatima Yasmin

This article first appeared in Bazaar India's December 2025 print edition
 

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