Yaghoub Emdadian is an Iranian modernist landscape painter. Despite his stylistic differences in different periods, his paintings have always been focused on nature. Yaghoub is the brother of famous contemporary Iranian painters Davoud and Fatemeh Emdadian. His father was interested in painting and copied the works of the Barbizon doctrine with colored pencils. His brother Davoud also pursued painting, and this became the basis for Jacob's acquaintance and interest in painting. He began his artistic studies at the Mirk Academy of Fine Arts in Tabriz, after that he went to the capital and got his painting diploma at the Tehran Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. He was then admitted to the Tehran School of Decorative Arts and graduated with a bachelor's degree in painting from this university. Emdadian chose this university because of his strong interest in Hossein Kazemi to study under his personal supervision. He also completed his postgraduate studies in graphic design at the same university.

Emdadian held his first solo exhibition in 1971 at the Aftab House in Tehran, and three years later he exhibited his works at the Seyhoun Gallery. This path has continued till this day. He has had more than 20 solo exhibitions in Iran, Oman and Pakistan and has showcased his works in more than 25 group exhibitions in countries such as France, Lebanon, USA, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.

After the Revolution of 1978, in addition to painting, Emdadian had various responsibilities in artistic management in governmental centers. He was organizing the publications and works of Niavaran Cultural Center, deputy and artistic expert of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts between 1984 to 2004. Mojabi writes in this regard: "Yaghoub Emdadian has done another important service in the last two decades by working as a museum owner. He has been the Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and had an important role in the preservation and accumulation of museum works, holding important Iranian and international biennials and exhibitions, as well as the organization of visual artists. "He is trying to restore the museum's prestige to what is mentioned in the statute, so that the museum is a crossroads of creative creations of Eastern and Western artists, in order to connect cultures and understand different artistic perspectives in the field of visual arts."

Emdadian tends to Cubism in his early paintings, but gradually turns to abstraction. Traces of the geometric view of the first period remains in his abstract paintings. His later paintings are variations of colored squares and rectangles that sit side by side in different dimensions and overlap in sections. "Emdadian is basically a landscape painter. Extensive and radiant landscapes have always fascinated him, whether in his quasi-Cubist paintings of country houses, fields and deserts, or in semi-abstract compositions in which the earth and sky are transformed into rectangular colored and textured shapes,” Pakbaz writes about him. "His recent works can be interpreted as a combination of form geometry and color lyricism."