It is easy to forget that Yousuf Bashir Qureshi wasn't trained to be an artist.

His interests, which range from fashion design to the fine arts, have taken him to Hollywood and back. Yet if you asked him about his youth, he would tell you that he was the last person who could be expected to walk this path.

“When I was in 9th grade, I was in a cadet college. I was one of the macho kids, the sporty kind…,” he reminisces about his early days. "If you ask my college buddies or my high school friends if they thought that I would go into fashion design, they would say ‘absolutely not’."

Yet it was in college that Qureshi established ‘The Flower Making Club’ and started making flowers, he tells me. Perhaps that's where his interest in the arts germinated, I wonder?

“That’s where it ended,” he scoffs. It is clear that for all my painstaking research, nothing is going to be as I had expected.

The Commune, where YBQ works and loans space to fellow artists — Photo by the author

The birth of an artist

The Commune, the venue of our interview and Qureshi's workspace that he also loans to fellow artists, sits in the heart of Saddar. It is a former tobacco warehouse in a continual process of being restored. It is a space that is at once tranquil and evocative of the bustling city around it. The architecture speaks of the area’s history, while the graffiti on the walls reflects the energetic experimentation that one expects in an artistic commune. This is clearly a haven for the creative mind.

For Qureshi, art is communication with himself, which aids his self-discovery. When his experiments with flower-making were met with disdain in his youth, he abandoned it and threw his attention back into sports. However, after moving to America and taking up ballet (which was again contradictory to most people's perception of masculinity), he realized that his true passion lay in fashion and art.

“There was an urge in me to do something with fashion,” he says. “I started doing costumes; you know I used to show horses. I used to dress up in jamawaar jodhpuris and really nice sherwanis and I’d show horses. I got my clients from there as well; I started designing costumes for horse shows. That was my first step into the world of fashion."

It seems that there was no stopping the arts after that. Qureshi moved from fashion to photography, simply to make shoots easier.

"Photography came out of necessity,” Qureshi says, “I constantly had to tell the photographer ‘iss ko iss tarha khaincho’ so I just decided to do it myself. Then I realized that all the mediums I experimented with answered a lot of questions about me.”

"Then I picked up the canvas and sculpture. I ventured into different things. Yet, at the end of the day, it was the same story. I started getting close to who I actually was and not what society wanted me to be. And again, the journey continues. Every incident brings you closer to you as long as you’re honest to yourself."

A door that tells many stories — Photo by the author

In a world where many deliberately court controversy to sell work, Qureshi’s outlook comes across as remarkably grounded and refreshing. When I ask him about his Silk Café in Lincoln, Nebraska, based on the Silk Route that runs between Pakistan and China, he reveals a rather spooky backstory.

"I opened The Silk Café in an old Irish pub. People said it was haunted, and nobody took that place. It was in a basement in really dilapidated condition. I opened a café there, and to everyone’s surprise, it did really well. I was using a lot of silks at that time, hence the name.”

After the Silk Café, Qureshi moved into designing for Hollywood, and he describes his initial experience of working with celebrities as a novelty, albeit one that he got used to relatively quickly.

“They’re just like you or I. With them, I did not look at it as a business. I got a chance to work with a lot of A-list names and it helped me grow as an artist. At that time there was no internet or no Facebook.”

Some would find it funny that Qureshi defines his work as experimentation. He has designed for the likes of Madonna, Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morrissette, worked on costumes for box office behemoths such as The Matrix, had his photographs published in Vogue and National Geographic and has recently exhibited a retrospective titled ‘Recollections’ at Canvas Gallery in Karachi.

At the moment, the warehouses at Miskeen Gali that house events such as exhibitions and qawwalis are empty, but Qureshi’s design workshop and personal office buzzes with activity. His assistant proudly shows me around the workshop, holding up minute details such as the YBQ logo on a blue tunic for my benefit. Behind the table, a paneled door leans against the wall, embellished with stories written by Qureshi and a fellow artist. The walls are covered with framed paintings and photographs.

In Qureshi’s personal studio, I am entreated to a look at a rendering of Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s face, which sits on a worktable as a work in progress. It is one in a series of many, all likenesses of Qureshi’s friends.

Sharmeen's face mould, a work in progress — Photo by the author

Qureshi credits his overcoming of childhood fears with his victory over personal barriers. He speaks to me of a culture of fear in Pakistan, where we are taught to dread everything from political instability to mythical beasts. According to him though, these fears are not always a bad thing, as he would not have broken out of limiting preconceptions if he had not desired to defeat the bogeymen.

“I came from a very different background. My father was a farmer. My grandfather was a farmer and a businessman. I came from a background in which art did not have much space. I did not grow up looking at photographs or paintings. I did not go to art shows or look at fashion magazines. My childhood was in a boarding school. I rediscovered myself mostly when I was in the United States, when I got the opportunity to be by myself.”

When one has achieved as much as Qureshi has, it is almost mandatory to ask where he gets his inspiration from. He has this to say:

“I get inspiration from everywhere. Sometimes from the trees, sometimes my students teach me. It’s an ongoing experience. Life is a beautiful gift.”

For Qureshi, the journey continues.