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Ling Tan for Vogue Germany (November 1998)

Fuke

As the Quran has it, Prophet Muhammad took a night trip to heaven aboard a trusty winged pony-horse-mule-ish creature called Buraq. It’s an episode that’s inspired Islamic art ever since, because few artists can resist a theologically sound reason to draw a winged horse. Yasmine Seale writes, “The friction between the historical Prophet and his fantastical mount, between the sacred and the physical, reflects a similar divide within Buraq herself: she has been perceived both as a dream-horse—mythical, sexless, emblematic—and as a creature of flesh. And Buraq as animal, especially in her more sexualized incarnations, in turn raises thorny questions about the body of the Prophet himself. Artists generally elided this problem, or creatively eluded it; early images of the Prophet tend to show him with a veil, and more recently his body has been symbolized by a white cloud, a rose, or a flame.”

The start of a new day.

Kamloops Winterby Laurazee

PEACEFUL VALLEY (oil on canvas)

VALLY OF FIRE. (oil on canvas)

PASSION FLOWER. (oil on canvas)

the rose she had offered was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his twenty-first year