http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/international/asia/13ARTI.html
New York Times/International 1.13.02 Afghan Artist Erases Layers of Repression 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. [clip]