India, March 6 -- It's not unusual for an artist to use ash, metal dust, industrial lacquer, resin, found objects, digital transfers, even dried blood in their works. Andy Warhol, famously, urinated on canvases primed with copper paints to create his Oxidation series in the 1970s. Abby Leigh flattens her oil and wax paintings to squiggles with a sledgehammer. Lucien Smith uses a fire extinguisher to apply paint to canvas.

It makes the material more than a medium. Art, after all, is the embodiment of an idea, not the application of pigment to a surface. That is why I feel drawn to the surrealist, maximalist art of Raqib Shaw. The Kashmiri artist based in London, shares powerful messages of displacement, desire, and the price of human crue...