SHOWCASE
/ ARTIST / 2025
| ARTIST: | Lewanay |
| COUNTRY: | Pakistan |
| EMAIL: | harishidayat.1991@gmail.com |
| CONTACT: |
lwnystudio.com facebook.com/lewanayharis instagram.com/lewanayharis www.linkedin.com/in/haris-hidayat-43a076140 |
| I’m Haris Hidayat, an illustrator and designer working under the name lewanay, a Pashto word for a whimsical or untamed person. My practice draws from personal and collective memory, subcultural histories. I’m interested in how illustration can serve as a space for reflection and resistance. Much of my work places the body at its center - tracing how it endures, shifts, or fractures under overgrown modernity. I’m drawn to the visual residue of a world shaped by hyper-consumption and advanced technological systems, shape our inner worlds, disturb longing, and create feelings of dislocation. Through drawing, I examine the tensions between alienation and intimacy, control and collapse, often moving between the poetic and the political. Based between Lahore and Bangkok, I work across music collectives, activist libraries, and fashion labels. I approach illustration not only as image-making but as a method to hold space, for ambivalence, complexity, and care. |
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The Lost Path
Set in a canyon turned circuitboard, this illustration imagines a forgotten landscape where a colossal head presides over a community of performers, machines, and signal-bearing structures. Originally designed for a festival that never came to be, the piece has evolved into a reflection on lost transmissions, collective rituals, and the strange afterlives of abandoned futures. Music, memory, and machinery converge in a terrain both celebratory and surreal.
Remembrance is Resistance
A meditation on creative inertia and the weight of material culture, this piece explores the entanglement of capital and identity. A dormant figure sits at the center, fragmented yet functional, surrounded by potted plants, collectible objects, and dual-screen dream logic. The composition reflects a state of suspended becoming, where selfhood is both consumed and aestheticised. Claustrophobic yet still, the work quietly asks: what part of you survives under constant accumulation?
Survivors
Created as album artwork for Janoobi Khargosh, this piece follows a lone figure chosen to save a dying planet. Armed only with Sach (Urdu for “truth”), he journeys through surreal landscapes shaped by loss, longing, and alien logic. The solution he seeks lies at the edge of the universe, revealed not as a weapon or code, but as Khoobsoorti (beauty). Blending science fiction with allegory, the work explores how truth and beauty survive even in the face of collapse.
Red Bull Radio
Commissioned for Red Bull Radio’s global launch, this piece was designed as part of a vinyl mailer sent to musicians and cultural figures. The illustration captures the overwhelming circuitry of a hybrid broadcast station, where analog machinery spirals into modern tech. With tangled wires, signal loops, and overlapping instruments, the composition reflects the messy beauty of audio culture in transition.
Vinland in Space
Illustrating Rudoh’s debut EP Vinland in Space (the foundational release of Bangkok-based Jugaar Records), this artwork encapsulates the chaotic elegance of electro breakbeats architecture driven by glitchy synths, theatrical atmospherics, and snappy hip‑hop roots. The central figure sits before a monolithic machine powered by a lone flower. The image merges organic life and mechanical mayhem, echoing the EP’s tension between dance‑floor energy and headphone intimacy.
RomRom Poster
Created for ROMROM, a Bangkok based music label and party series, this poster captures the city's electric essence. Set against the backdrop of Bangkok’s iconic skyline, the scene brims with subtle yet surreal festivities. Dancers, sound systems, and structures vibrating with energy. The artwork weaves together the spirit of the city and the label’s sonic ethos, turning the lineup into a living landscape, where music and place become inseparable.
A Great Tragedy with a lot of Product Placement
A dismembered yet functioning body sits amidst a sterile, overstocked backdrop. Jars, shelves, and products stacked with unsettling precision. The figure’s detached expression mirrors the absurdity of survival in a hyper-commercial world. This illustration explores bodily fragmentation, alienation, and the quiet violence of consumerism, where tragedy unfolds in plain sight, all merchandised.
Dukha - Sadness & Water
Drawing from Sumana Roy’s essay “Dukkha: Sadness and Water,” this composition is inspired by the metaphor: the eye as a bucket holding tears, the direct vessel of sorrow. A luminous orb, filled with floating eyes, hovers above a dark water surface. In each corner are visual motifs from the text: a tap, a saline drip, a hand with a cannula, and a paper boat. Each symbolising different manifestations of grief and the bodily experience of pain. Executed in the style of traditional miniature painting, the image combines emotional resonance within its form.