Pakistan’s National College of Arts, a redbrick building pushed back from Lahore’s busy Mall Road, is a somehow pleasing Orientalist mash-up built in 1875 by Rudyard Kipling’s father. The central quadrangle is surrounded by a colonnade that serves as both passageway and common room. When I visited in 2013, students leaned against the walls and sat on the floor with their laptops and phones. They were studying architecture, design, musicology, sculpture, and painting. Men and women wore jeans, kurtas, and loose sandals that made soft flapping sounds as they walked. The few women who covered their heads did so with pretty, patterned scarves. The conversations were easily, casually, coed.

Interviews with N.C.A. students and teachers were hard to arrange from New York; I wondered whether they were worried about talking to an American. Once I arrived, I realized the reason was much simpler: as on any college campus, everyone was always busy. But they were also always ready to talk. I was allowed to roam freely through the school.

Lahoris think of their city as a safe place in a dangerous country, and within Lahore, N.C.A. is a special refuge. The Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid described it as “a microcosm of Pakistan, but a creative Pakistan, an alternative to the desiccated Pakistan.”

The beating heart of the school is the miniature-painting department. Miniatures originated in Persia and were brought to the Indian subcontinent when the Mughals conquered it in the sixteenth century. They could take on almost any subject: landscapes or portraits; stories of love, war, or play. The British were eager collectors of the paintings, which could be as small as ten by four inches and usually incorporated gold and other valuable pigments. They founded N.C.A. in part to keep the tradition alive.

In the 1990s, a group of artists who later became known in the international art world as neo-miniaturists were students at N.C.A. Shahzia Sikander was the first among them to bring the modern miniature to the West; she now lives and works in New York. For a while, her huge talent represented the whole genre. But recently, her classmate Imran Qureshi has become equally prominent. In 2013, he had an installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was named Deutsche Bank’s artist of the year. His work often includes Mughal-inspired foliage interspersed with Jackson Pollock–like spatters. A leaf that is a fraction of the size of a fingernail in a miniature painting becomes as big as a hand in his installations.

Qureshi, who is in his early forties, lives in Lahore and teaches at N.C.A. He invited me to visit his studio there, where a group of first-year students sat on big square pillows that lined the perimeter of the room. Drawing boards were propped on their laps, and their pencils and paints lay by their knees. They were drawing grids. Upstairs, in another studio, a smaller group sat in a circle. These were the third-year students who had chosen to major in miniature painting. A small set of portable speakers quietly played American pop music, and a middle-aged man from the canteen came around to take orders for snacks: chai, potato chips, cookies.

Each of the third-year students was working on something different. There were no teachers supervising them, and the room felt both more focused and more relaxed than the studio downstairs. I saw several paintings that combined traditional and modern references; one student was drawing Mughal figures inside TV screens. Most of these students had not actually seen a Mughal miniature painting in person. The British built the Lahore Museum next to N.C.A. to be a teaching museum, and there was originally a door between the buildings so that students could duck in to study original pieces. No longer. Because of safety concerns, the Lahore Museum has locked up its miniature collection and special permission is needed to see the paintings.

I stopped next to a student named Minahil Hafeez, who was drawing rows and rows of tiny vertical lines, a few centimeters high, in pencil. She was the only person in the room working in gray scale and abstraction. She told me that the students were busy preparing their portfolios for the thesis show that would take place in a few weeks. In the meantime, their work was being subjected to rounds of critical examinations (known here, as in art schools everywhere, as crits), in which Qureshi and the rest of their teachers would give them feedback. The next day the whole class would gather for a crit. “Come, you’ll see,” she said with a slight tilt of her head.

The next morning, there were twice as many students in the studio. Hafeez beckoned me over to sit by her and ordered me chai from the canteen man. Qureshi was one of four teachers seated at the front of the room. One by one the students were called up. There were two parts to each crit: first, the students showed their work, and then they were asked to speak about it.

The students and teachers mixed languages, often starting in English and switching to Urdu for more complicated ideas or for jokes. Qureshi generally weighed in last, and he spent more time looking than talking. When he did speak, his voice was gruff. He said little to the most promising students. When Hafeez’s turn came, Qureshi pulled out two paintings that he thought were “moving in a new direction.” And he suggested the obvious: that she start experimenting with color.

There is money in Lahore, old and new, and society. Society as it existed in New York for Edith Wharton: a small number of families whose lives are intertwined by marriage, wealth, and education. Some of these people spend money on art, but not as much as they spend on cars, jewelry, and designer clothes. Punjabis are famously, sincerely showy.

I glimpsed this side of Lahore at night, when I was invited to house parties by some of the city’s gallerists. Among the elite, there is a casual attitude toward drinking alcohol, and hash is ubiquitous, a dark, purply-brown, tarlike substance rolled into balls and kept in pockets. At one party I attended, hospitality was shown by a row of neatly rolled joints arranged on the marble countertop of the bathroom.

N.C.A. is both a part of this world and outside it. There are students who come from the Lahori elite, but they are in the minority. Tuition is less than $1,000 a year, and three quarters of the students receive financial aid from the government. There is also a geographic quota system; each province of Pakistan is represented. As the northwest part of the country has become increasingly violent, the diversity within N.C.A. has become more than geographic; it is experiential.

Qureshi introduced me to Sajid Khan, a student of his who graduated with distinction in 2012. Khan was from Swat, an administrative district near the Afghan border. It is where Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban in 2012 on her way to school during her campaign for girls’ education. What Yousafzai wants for girls across Pakistan is what the female students at N.C.A. have: education, freedom, equality.

When I asked Khan about coming to N.C.A., he described it as “another country, like Australia or New Zealand, very peaceful.” He lived with two of his former N.C.A. classmates in the semi-squalor of college roommates post-graduation. When he asked me whether I would like some tea, the same middle-aged man who worked in the N.C.A. canteen appeared with a cup and smiled at me in recognition.

Khan was now working as a digital graphic artist at a gaming company and only had time to paint in the evenings and on weekends. He showed me images from his thesis show on his laptop. One had a rich, dark-blue background — the color was so deep because it has been painted in layers, on a handmade paper called wasli. The miniature was the classical Mughal size, but it was mostly abstract: in the center was a cloud in purple, fuchsia, and gold leaf; two bees hovered above it. He said the miniature depicted his family’s garden, which had been bombed.

The work had already been sold, to a local gallery called the Drawing Room (now known as Taseer Art Gallery). During the thesis show, every corner of N.C.A. is used by student artists to display their work, and everything is for sale. “It’s healthy for the students to sell their work,” Qureshi told me, “so they don’t get too attached.”

Link : http://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/pakistan-in-miniatures/3/