This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Afghan Artist Erases Layers of Repression January 13, 2002 By MARK LANDLER KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 12 - Muhammad Yousef Asefi does his best work with a palette and a paintbrush. These days, he has happily put them aside for a sponge soaked in water. Many mornings, Dr. Asefi can be found at the National Gallery here, gently scrubbing landscapes and portraits he painted years ago. Each brush of the sponge brings a revelation. A swan glides on a shimmering stream, where there had been only water. A man stands on a quay in Amsterdam, where there had been a tall stand of flowers. It looks like a magic trick. In fact, it is the happy outcome of an act of cultural subterfuge against a repressive rule. When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1996, they reimposed an old Islamic ban on depiction of living creatures in paintings and drawings. For Dr. Asefi, a physician and a prominent Afghan artist, it was a creative death sentence. He was forbidden to paint the horses and other animals that animate his landscapes, and hundreds of his paintings hanging in the National Gallery, the Foreign Ministry and the presidential palace were also in danger of being destroyed. So Dr. Asefi devised a risky plan to save them. Over the five years of Taliban rule, he painstakingly altered 120 oil paintings, blotting out the offending creatures with watercolor. Today, he has become a sort of archaeologist, removing the paint to reveal the life underneath. "Taking it off is easy," Dr. Asefi said, as he deftly brought back the crowd in a painting of a quay in the Amsterdam flower market. "Putting it on was very difficult." In a heady aftermath of the Taliban, stories abound of filmmakers who hid spools of film or musicians who stashed records and tapes from the authorities. Culture did not cease in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban; it merely went underground. Few insurgents were craftier than Dr. Asefi, a 41-year-old native of Kabul. The son of a government worker, he is an unlikely rebel. Although Dr. Asefi loved art from childhood, he earned a medical degree as a hedge against the vagaries of painting. With his mild manner and neatly trimmed beard, Dr. Asefi looks more like an office worker than an artist. When he talks about the Taliban, though, his usually twinkling eyes harden. "They were determined to destroy the culture of Afghanistan," Dr. Asefi said. "Gradually, step by step, they would have come around to destroying my paintings." Dr. Asefi said he would have been beaten and jailed if the Taliban had caught him and realized that he was undercutting their ban. His medical career would also have been over. Yet none of this deterred him. He was helped immeasurably in his campaign by Muhammad Saber Latifi, a prosperous businessman who is his patron. In addition to giving him money and arranging to exhibit his paintings outside Afghanistan, Mr. Latifi encouraged Dr. Asefi in his deception. Mr. Latifi turned over a room in his office for Dr. Asefi to hide portraits that could not be altered. And he gave Dr. Asefi a studio, where he could paint without fear of being caught. Mr. Latifi's crusade went beyond Dr. Asefi. Shortly after the Taliban came to power, he paid off a guard at the National Gallery to sell him 50 paintings that were likely to run afoul of the government. The paintings, most by 20th-century European artists, included several nudes. For the last five years, they have been rolled up in an underground bunker at Mr. Latifi's office, next to a collection of copper jugs. A heavy flower pot once blocked the door. "I could have lost my life and the lives of my family for keeping nudes," Mr. Latifi said. "But we had to resist the rule of the Taliban because it was evil. We could not succumb to it." Dr. Asefi's resistance began on Sept. 26, 1996, when the Taliban swept into Kabul, seized the presidential palace and executed the former president, Najibullah. Soon after they entered the palace, the Taliban tore up eight of Dr. Asefi's paintings, which hung there. Hearing about this, Dr. Asefi worried about 42 other paintings of his in the Foreign Ministry. After experimenting at home with watercolor over oil paint, Dr. Asefi visited the ministry and proposed to the new Taliban officials that he repair the paintings. He collected the works and over 2 1/2 months, methodically covered the depictions of living creatures. Dr. Asefi then rotated the paintings so that none hung in its original place. He wanted to avoid the danger that a sharp-eyed official might notice a missing person or horse. When one Taliban official quizzed him, Dr. Asefi told him he was "redecorating." As it happens, nobody seemed to notice the changes. Dr. Asefi believes that is mostly because the religious extremism of the Taliban allowed for little appreciation of art. "The Taliban were not interested in art," he said. "They just looked at the pictures and if they saw a living creature, they put it on a list to be destroyed." Once he completed his work at the ministry, Dr. Asefi moved on to the National Gallery, where he altered 80 paintings over three months. Despite its edict, the Taliban had not yet turned its attention there. He removed some portraits, which no amount of watercolor could fix, and replaced them with landscapes of similar size. Dr. Asefi's alterations were not always subtle. In the painting of Amsterdam, his use of large bunches of flowers to obscure people is almost comically obvious. Nor is the cleansing process foolproof. In scrubbing the watercolor off a painting of an Afghan landscape, Dr. Asefi uncovered the image of a man on horseback. But the oil paint under the watercolor also faded, marring the look of the painting. The point of Dr. Asefi's campaign, however, was not to create new art, but to save his existing art from the Taliban's knives and torches. In this, he succeeded brilliantly. As a result, Dr. Asefi has become something of a cultural hero in Afghanistan. His days are filled with meetings with cultural officials, visiting dignitaries, and foreign journalists. Next month, his paintings will be exhibited in London. "He is a symbol of cultural resistance," said the culture minister of Afghanistan's interim government, Sayeed Makhdoom Rahin, after welcoming Dr. Asefi. "We are proud of him." As the doctor rushes to his next appointment - hurtling through Kabul in a battered Volkswagen beetle, one wonders how his new-found celebrity will affect his art. The early years of the Taliban rule were tough on Dr. Asefi. Aside from altering paintings, he produced little new work. Unable to show or sell his paintings, he considered abandoning art altogether and concentrating on his career as an internist. "He seemed a broken man," Mr. Latifi said. "At one time, he had been respected and praised as one of our finest artists. But under the Taliban, being a painter was rubbish." Yet adversity forced Dr. Asefi into new directions. He began to experiment with a more abstract style, partly to stretch himself and partly to evade the strictures of the Taliban. The other day, Dr. Asefi proudly showed off an abstract painting, which he said depicted a spider in its web. Chuckling, he noted that observers of art far more astute than the Taliban would have trouble picking out the creature in this indeterminate canvas. "I wanted to develop a new style," he said. "But I wanted a style that the Taliban would not recognize." Dr. Asefi said the fall of the Taliban had recharged him. Still, it is tough finding time to turn out new paintings when people are clamoring to hear about how he rescued his old ones. For all the acclaim, he also recognizes that he saved only a fraction of his country's treasures. "If I had the ability to cover the Buddhas of Bamian, I would have done it," said Dr. Asefi, referring to the giant statues that were blown up last year by the Taliban. 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