Art collecting is one of those things you could spend a lifetime exploring because no two collections are ever quite the same. Each one quietly tells a different story, depending on the person behind it. Today, we are stepping inside the collection of Zina Khair — fashion entrepreneur and one of the leading collectors of Syrian art, whom you may already know from our earlier piece busting a few common myths about art collecting.

Perhaps her passion was inevitable. Zina grew up in Damascus in a family where art was simply part of everyday life. Artists were family friends, conversations about paintings happened around the dinner table, and artworks weren't treated like precious museum pieces — they were there to be lived with.

Interestingly, her own collecting journey began with a single painting that was never meant to become the start of a collection. But, as it turned out, it did. Today, Zina isn't simply buying art — she is preserving stories, relationships, and a part of Syria's cultural memory.

Every collection has to begin somewhere. For Zina, it all started with Badawiyatan (Two Bedouin Women) by Fateh Moudarres. Interestingly, the painting comes from the final decade of the artist's career, by which point he had well and truly settled into the visual language that made him one of Syria's greatest modernists.

Although Moudarres was born in Aleppo, his artistic imagination remained firmly rooted in rural Syria. He returned again and again to village life and Bedouin culture, treating them as the keepers of the country's oldest cultural memory. Another recurring motif is women, and they are never merely sitters. They are symbols of endurance and continuity, doing rather a lot of quiet work in every frame.

By this point, his visual language had become unmistakable: faces simplified almost into masks, flattened space, and a palette of earthy reds, ochres and blacks. One detail makes his work all the more compelling: Moudarres believed history never truly disappears — it simply lingers. Which is perhaps why his figures always seem to stand in two centuries at once, ancient and completely present.

Some paintings are valuable because of who made them. Others because of who they depict. Suha and Munzer, for Each Their Christ by Fateh Moudarres happens to be both. It is the work that means the most to Zina's family, as the two figures are her parents, Suha and Munzer Khair. Yet Moudarres wasn't simply painting their likeness.

The Dubai Collection notes reveal why. Moudarres and Munzer Khair shared a friendship that stretched far beyond the usual artist-collector relationship. Over the years they debated art, politics and philosophy, and Munzer became not only one of the artist’s most important collectors but also someone who believed deeply in his work, supported his career, and ultimately helped preserve his legacy.

When I asked Zina to name her favourite piece, it turned out to be rather the wrong question. A favourite, she explained, is a hard thing to pin down — what she does have is the work she feels most drawn to on any given day. So, on this particular day, what caught her eye?

The answer was Ana wa Qalilun min al Hob ("Me and a Little Love") by Oussama Diab, painted in 2008.

Diab is far better known for tackling political conflict, freedom and displacement, which makes this piece something of an outlier — altogether more personal and intimate. And knowing his broader body of work, that "little love" is unlikely to be purely romantic. More often than not, love in Diab's world stands in for hope, glimpsed somewhere in the middle of uncertainty.

The year matters here, too. Painted in 2008, Me and a Little Love predates the Syrian civil war, giving it a different emotional tone from the work Diab would create after 2011.

Another thing worth pointing out is where Diab draws his inspiration. Picasso and Basquiat are among the artists who influenced him, but rather than imitating them, he uses fragments of their visual language to build something entirely his own. The result blends references to Palestinian identity (his family is of Palestinian origin), Syrian life and contemporary politics with the bold, expressive energy of Neo-Expressionism.

Collections, much like the people behind them, are always evolving. The latest work to join Zina's is an untitled painting from 1990 by Leila Nseir.

By this point, Nseir had spent decades moving through realism, expressionism, surrealism and abstraction — and rather than ever settling on one, she simply refused to choose. Her paintings blend all of them at once, landing somewhere delightfully in-between figurative and abstract.

One of her real signatures was material: Nseir favoured oil pastel on wood, and treated the support itself as part of the creative process rather than just something to paint on top of.

And then there are the faces. Once you have seen a Nseir painting, you will spot one from across the room: large, almond-shaped eyes, pared-back features, and an expression that is quiet and somehow entirely timeless — as though her figures know something the rest of us don't.

Ask any collector about their biggest regret and, more often than not, they will tell you about the artwork they didn't buy. Zina is no exception. She won't say exactly which painting it was, but she does reveal the artist: Marwan Kassab-Bachi, one of the greatest figures of Syrian modern art. He is best known for his haunting "face landscapes", where thick layers of paint transform human faces into almost geological forms.