Affandi went on to perform the obligatory and de rigueur haj (pilgrimage) in the holy Muslim city Mecca with his wife in 1977. It’s rare in his oeuvre to have painted the Ka’abah, the most sacred monument of Islamic faith in the Masjid al-Haram in Saudi Arabia. As far as is known, there are only few pieces of Ka’abah, one of them was a 1981 piece measuring 112 x 137cm, featured in collector’s Rake Sumichan book, Affandi (Yayasan Bina Lestari Budaya, 1987), with text by Limar Kayan. The staccato squiggles of white all over may represent the worshippers milling around the Black Stone (tawaf, the ritual of circling it seven times, counter-clockwise), which also double as a khat (Islamic calligraphic) salah or prayer. The Ka’abah is shown at the bottom, off right,   Affandi belongs to the select core of Asia’s most elite artists like Datuk Ibrahim Hussein (Malaysia), M.F. Husain (India), Thawan Duchanee (Thailand) and Cheong Soo-pieng (Singapore). His career is also closely intertwined with the socio-political fabric of Indonesia, with him being affiliated with important groups such as the Bandung 5 (1935), the People’s Painters (1947), the Indonesian Painters Association (1948), and Persagi (Persatuan Ahli Gambar Indonesia). He represented Indonesia in major biennials in Brazil (1952 and 1956), Sydney (1973) and Venice (1954) where he won a prize. He spent two years in India (1949-1950), and toured Europe in 1951-1954 and the United States, for four months, in 1957. In 1969, he was awarded the gold medal art award, and in August 1978 the Bintang Jasa Utama from the Indonesian president. His highest accolade was the Peace Award by the Dag Hammarskjoeld Foundation in 1977. Renowned critic Herbert Read hailed Affandi as a painter “who had succeeded in developing a new course of expressionism.” In October-November 2020, the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta, organised a major Affandi exhibition, Alam, Ruang, Manusia (Nature, Space, Human), which echoed his 1987 Retrospective. His house in Yogyakarta on the Gajah Wong River has been turned into a museum of his works.