Year of Birth:
1969

Disability:
Visual Impairment

Occupation:
Artist

At the onset of his artistic career, Victor, a gifted sculptor with visual impairment, was alerted by his well- meaning, condescending lecturers and artist friends to purge himself from the pool of artists with disabilities. “To be treated as a professional artist, mingle with the professionals and stop entertaining press interviews quipping about your disability,” they unanimously cautioned. Artistic genius aside, what these sighted able-bodied advisors did not know is that Victor’s benefactors-in-need had been two nurturing charities. Whilst one equipped him with independent living skills to face life with fortitude after visual impairment; the other gave him a formal art education and a public platform for his artistic talents when his name was still an anonymity.

“To me,
Art is life,
life is art.
Art is part of me
as it can be apart from me.
Art is about possibility.
It is open to anyone.”
- Victor Tan

To both, he had pledged commitment to return one day as a volunteer and steer the path of others with sensorial impairment. With or without sight, Victor is an artist by virtue of his artistic aptitude. He chalked out ideas, assignments, blood and sweat like any of his classmates in Arts college. His art was critiqued, insulted, ridiculed by his punishing art lecturers and suffered the same embarrassment as any of his classmates for shoddy work. Yet it is without sight that Victor becomes a greater and more sincere artist by virtue of the added problems he has to circumvent to stay professional. He memorises Art theories through a cassette recording or a dictator. He updates his resumes with the help of a computerised voice-to-text translator.

He conducts research through borrowed hands and eyes. He visits museums and galleries that are friendly and accessible to him and appreciates Art through the sense of touch, smell and hearing. In a way, Victor’s visual challenge has introduced a façade of Art that highlights his artistic strengths and imagination, a facet of Art that renders his works of touch unique. In the heat of presiding artistic chauvinism and intolerance, what better way to gag unfair judgements passed on artists with disabilities and their works than for Victor, an accomplished artist with disability, to identify himself with the misunderstood group and campaign for Truth? Herein is courage and an artist larger than life.