Dr. Mohammad Yousof Asefi

Mohammad Yousof Asefi was born on June 3, 1960, in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father was a career government employee in the customs department. Growing up in the Afghan capital, Asefi developed an early interest in drawing and the visual arts, though formal training would come later. He graduated from Habibia High School in 1980 and immediately entered three years of compulsory military service in the Afghan army. It was during this period that he received his first serious instruction in painting from Nasrullah Sarwari, one of the most accomplished Afghan artists of his generation. He also studied under Ghulam Sediq Sediq, another renowned painter. These formative years under two masters laid the foundation for a career that would span more than four decades.

In 1983, Asefi enrolled at the Kabul Medical Institute, graduating with his MD in general medicine in 1989. While pursuing his medical degree, he joined the Afghanistan Artists' Association in 1984 and began exhibiting and selling his paintings. In 1985, he held his first solo exhibition inside the Kabul Medical University, which drew considerable appreciation. By 1988, he had won a gold medal at an exhibition organized by the Ministry of Higher Education. He participated in two exhibitions in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 1989, earning the Abu Ali Sina honorary medal. After graduating, he practiced internal medicine in Kabul while continuing to paint with increasing intensity. The tension between his two vocations grew until 1997, when he made the decisive choice to abandon medicine entirely and devote himself to art.

By the early 1990s, Asefi had established himself as one of Afghanistan's foremost painters. Around 1991, Prime Minister Fazal Haq Khaliqyar personally opened his art show at the hall of the Artists' Union of Afghanistan, presenting him with a medal and later commissioning him to decorate the Prime Minister's building. About a year before the Taliban seized power, officials under President Burhanuddin Rabbani asked Asefi to decorate both the presidential palace — the Arg — and the Foreign Ministry. More than sixty of his paintings hung between the two locations. His works also adorned the Nangarhar Palace, Bank-e-Millie Afghan and its Zabuli Museum, De-Afghanistan Bank, Afghanistan International Bank, the Ministry of Public Health, and numerous other public and private buildings. He used the income from these commissions to purchase a plot of land in Kabul — the future site of the Asefi Art Gallery.

When the Taliban seized Kabul in September 1996, they imposed a sweeping ban on all depictions of living creatures — paintings, photographs, and sculptures were ordered destroyed. The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforced the ban ruthlessly, destroying at least 300 paintings from government buildings alone, including several of Asefi's own works from the presidential palace. In 1999, a holdover official at the Foreign Ministry approached Asefi about repairing war-damaged paintings. He accepted — and quietly began a far more dangerous undertaking. Working alone and in absolute secrecy, he painted watercolor foliage and landscapes over the human figures and animals in each canvas. Because the originals were oil-based, the watercolor could later be wiped away with a wet sponge, leaving the original work intact. Over the following months, he altered approximately 40 paintings and repaired 25 more at the Foreign Ministry. After the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, Asefi learned that the National Gallery was next. He obtained permission to "repair" paintings there as well. Deputy Said Enayat Ullah, aware of the true nature of his work, served as a lookout, alerting him when Taliban members entered the building. He altered approximately 80 more paintings and repaired about 40 others. Throughout this period, he continued painting in secret at his home — landscapes with people and animals that he could neither show nor sell. He told no one what he was doing. Discovery would have meant imprisonment, beatings, or death.

After the Taliban were driven from Kabul in late 2001, Asefi spent seven months carefully removing the watercolor from every canvas he had altered, revealing the original figures beneath. In December 2001, a fellow member of the Artists' Union organized a press event at the National Gallery. Twenty-five international media organizations attended as Asefi demonstrated his technique: a wet sponge moved slowly across a canvas, and a girl holding a basket of flowers emerged from beneath the paint. The story spread around the world overnight. In February 2002, Hamid Karzai, then head of the interim government, attended the formal reopening of the National Gallery and watched Asefi repeat the demonstration. In the years that followed, he was interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and dozens of other outlets. In 2003, National Geographic filmed a documentary — "Lost Treasures of Afghanistan" — and nominated him for an international award. In 2005, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him a commendation for his efforts to protect Afghan culture. He met U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker in 2002, and later former Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann sought him out after seeing one of his paintings in President Karzai's office. Foreign Minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah commissioned him to redecorate the Foreign Ministry. President Karzai asked him to redecorate the presidential palace and the Marmarin Palace. A room in the National Gallery was named after him.

Through the Ministry of Information and Culture, Asefi received invitations to art events around the world. He visited the national art theater of Indonesia in 2002 and participated in the Global Village exhibition in Dubai in 2003. In 2007, he became the first Afghan artist invited to participate in the art competition held by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), held that year in Rajasthan, India. He continued to participate in SAARC events across South Asia for the next decade — in Bhutan (2010, where his work "Contemplation" was recognized as a Master Art Piece), Sri Lanka (2012, 2018), Bangladesh (2012, 2014), Maldives (2013), Afghanistan (2015), and Nepal (2018). In 2012, his painting "Landschap" was included in dOCUMENTA 13, the prestigious contemporary art exhibition held at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, under the theme of collapse and recovery. He also exhibited in New Delhi (2006), Tehran (2013), and held solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, in 2020.

Beyond his own artistic practice, Asefi dedicated himself to nurturing the next generation of Afghan artists. At the Asefi Art Gallery, he organized painting classes that drew dozens of young and enthusiastic Afghans eager to learn. The gallery served as both a display space and an academy — a place where students could study technique, art history, and the cultural traditions of Afghanistan under the guidance of one of the country's most accomplished painters. For Asefi, teaching was inseparable from his broader mission of cultural preservation. A generation of Afghans had grown up knowing only war; through art education, he sought to reconnect them with their heritage and give them the tools to express their own experiences. Many of his students went on to develop their own artistic practices, carrying forward the traditions he had worked to protect.

In 2022, Asefi accepted a fellowship offered by Arizona State University as a research scholar. He arrived in the United States on April 6, 2022, with his wife Nahid and youngest son Mosawer. In October 2022, forty-three of his paintings were exhibited at ASU's Harry Wood Gallery under the title "War and Emotion." The works, many painted since leaving Afghanistan, included Arizona landscapes — the Grand Canyon, the Sonoran desert — alongside pieces addressing the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan, including the struggle of women denied access to education. A second exhibition followed in November 2024, organized by ASU's Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, during which he painted three works live before the audience. From the presidential palace in Kabul to a university gallery in Tempe, his career now spans four continents, twelve countries, and more than four decades of unbroken artistic practice.