Zain Masud: The world is her canvas

Zain Masud, recently appointed international director of India Art Fair, is uniquely at home in the world. Born to a Hijazi (Saudi Arabian) mother and Pakistani father, the 32-year-old grew up and got her degrees in Britain, worked for art galleries in Paris before moving to Dubai, where she was assistant director of Art Dubai, the region's most happening contemporary art jamboree, until 2014.

Masud spends part of the year in Beijing, where her father lives. It was where she met her Irish-American fiance, who has now moved to Moscow, and where she now spends a lot of time. At other times of the year, she is with her mother in London, her sister in Indonesia or her friends in Delhi. Zain's connection with India goes back further to her grandfather, her father's father, who was Tamil, a scribe in the Indian army who was posted in Singapore during World War II where he met his wife to-be, who too had a mixed heritage - partly from Calcutta (as it was then called), and partly from Sichuan province in China.

"It sounds crazy, but this is the reality of my life and what it has done is given me amazing access in the world," Zain says smiling, as she sits across the cafe table on a cloudy New Delhi afternoon, her last day in the city before she flies out to Mumbai and then on to London and Moscow next month. Incidentally, she's come to Delhi from Kolkata where she was attending the Curators Hub at Experimenter, the contemporary art gallery with one of the most cutting edge programmes in the country.

Zain is representative of a globe-trotting set of young (ok, youngish) art professionals - artists, curators, fair managers, critics and so on - who are driving the agenda at the growing numbers of art fairs, biennales and triennales that are crowding the calendar. Trans-culturalism is a virtue in this rarefied world that allows art to speak to and across cultures. At Art Dubai, for instance, Zain helped bring together artists from countries as far apart in every way as South Korea and Lebanon. It is this quality that India Art Fair organisers must be counting on as they seek to build on the considerable success that the event has found in the eight years it has been around.

Her diverse experiences have also helped Zain realise that "the grass isn't greener on the other side". China, for instance, she says, is way ahead of India in building museums, some of them pretty incredible. "But let's also admit that most of them are empty, and that there's a struggle to get people involved in contemporary art," she says.

The way Zain sees it, her knowledge of other cultures and other ways of doing things is cause for hope, to "see how we can deal with (problems) given the ingredients we have here. Let's also apply some international art-world thinking and galvanise people. Sometimes validation comes from outside and helps you recognise what you have here".

For this year, Zain's plan for India Art Fair is to raise the bar in terms of quality. So there'll be fewer galleries - 65-70, down from 85-90 in the years before. Another is to build the event as a platform for emerging artists from Southeast Asia, not just those that have been included by the gallery-exhibitors but also from less-represented places like Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka and from non-commercial entities. "Every art fair has to reflect its context. For IAF, it's not just India but the entire region which has been historically inter-linked," she says. It is also what visitors to the fair from the West want - a window to get their finger on the pulse of art from the region.

gargi.gupta@dnaindia.net, @togargi