Disabled artist overcomes challenges to enjoy success with artwork

The brush is held deftly between her big toe and the next toe, as artist Chan Tung-mui dips it in water and chooses her next colour. She swings the brush across the palette, settles on the brown and then brings it back to her painting, to deftly create tree trunks and brunches. Soon green leaves are added to create foliage in the forest scene against a night sky.

Chan, 42, has held a number of exhibitions in Hong Kong working with the Hong Kong Arts with the Disabled Association (ADA) as well as an international foot and mouth artists’ organisation, which creates calendars and cards from her artwork.

Born with cerebral palsy, Chan’s arms move with spasms and she sits talking with her hands tucked under her legs. Her speech is also affected by her condition, but her feet have become extraordinarily agile and dexterous to compensate for her hands. She passes her business card between her toes, and since the death of her mother in 2000, which was a tumultuous event in her life, she says she irons her father’s clothes – again holding the iron with her feet.

“Well, otherwise his clothes would be crumpled,” she says.

Chan’s artistic influences are varied, she says she enjoys different types of artists, but when pushed, cites Van Gogh. “No one taught me art at a young age,” she says, “it kind of came naturally that I leaned it myself and learned how to use my feet.”

Rather than oil or acrylics, Chan likes to use water colours. “Water colours are very multifaceted,” she says. “You can express it in many ways. The uniqueness of water colour is that it spreads very quickly, you can’t control it as well as oil, for example. So once you make a mistake, it’s very blatant. I want to challenge myself. That’s why I use water colours.