Dr. Mohammad Yousof Asefi

In September 1996, Taliban fighters swept into Kabul. Among their first acts: a sweeping ban on all depictions of living creatures. Paintings, photographs, sculptures — ordered destroyed. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice began enforcing the ban immediately, tearing apart decades of Afghan visual culture. At least 300 paintings were destroyed from government buildings in the early months alone.

Dr. Mohammad Yousof Asefi, a physician who had abandoned medicine the year before to devote himself entirely to painting, learned that his own works had been torn from the walls of the presidential palace. He had spent years decorating Afghanistan's most important buildings — the presidential palace, the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister's residence. More than sixty of his paintings had hung between the presidential palace and the Foreign Ministry.

He had never considered himself political. But watching the systematic erasure of his country's visual memory changed him. Working alone and in absolute secrecy, he devised a technique to hide the paintings in plain sight — painting watercolor foliage over the banned human figures, preserving the oil originals beneath.

Over the next five years, he saved more than 120 paintings (national and international) at the Foreign Ministry and the National Gallery. He told no one. Discovery would have meant imprisonment or death.