Year of Birth:
1965

Disability:
Quadriplegia

Occupation:
Artist

Gripping a brush between his teeth, pencil-thin and blanched Kok Leong is an image of patience and endurance. Smudging his brush again with Chinese Ink, he painstakingly enrobe his graceful phoenixes and peacocks in regal hues of purple and indigo blue. His Still Life of mythological creatures, flowers and fishes announce the arrival of spring, quite unlike the blush of melancholy beneath his oil portraits. On months when bed sores are not an issue, quiet and unassuming Kok Leong would paint for a stretch of two to three hours a day, comfortably propped up in his wheelchair. Neither the fragrant aroma from his wife’s frying pan nor the inviting laughter of his daughter could pull him away from the easel. Likewise, once he picks up his book, video camera or calligraphy brush, we know it is adios to the careless inducements around him.

His sense of responsibility overrides all temptations for the moment. As the sole breadwinner of a family with an elderly mother, greying aunt, a wife who is a fellow Mouth and Foot scholar and a growing daughter, how could he ever let anyone of them down? Looking at his calm and benign countenance, one can hardly trace the mischievous, presumptuous spitfire that he claimed he was at age 18. A close-to-fatal leg-locking somersault with a friend at a Lion Dance rehearsal in 1986 had riveted him to the floor and paralysed him from the neck down. Kok Leong, who chooses to see good in evil, recalls the accident matter-of-factly, without finger pointing nor bitterness. He magnanimously attributes his dramatic personality change to the accident and Art.