Korea x Canada x Disability Arts

Atanas Bozdarov, Sand Ramps, 2023-2025, digital print

In late September and early October, five artists with disabilities from the Republic of Korea and five artists with disabilities from Canada will embark on a ten-day tour across Canada, including stops at artsPlace in Canmore, Remote Gallery in Toronto, and Ottawa’s historic senate building.

Organized by the National accessArts Centre in Calgary in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, the Korean Foundation for International Culture Exchange, and the Korea Disability Arts and Culture Centre, Korea x Canada x Disability Arts: Expanding Boundaries and Possibilities commemorates the 2024-2025 KOREA-CANADA Year of Cultural Exchanges. At each stop in the tour, the artists will host a series of community roundtables and panel discussions to engage in deeper cultural exchange and connections, and showcase their creativity and insights.

Akimblog interviewed the Canadian artists in the collaboration and asked them these three questions:

1. Describe your art practice and the works you’ll be contributing to the exhibition.
2. How does disability relate to the art you make?
3. What do you hope to get out of this collaboration with the artists from Korea?

Atanas Bozdarov

1. My art practice uses sculpture, photography, and graphic design to explore access, disability, and public space. For this exhibition, I’m showing works from three series: Bad Ramps, sculptures that resemble ramps but don’t function, highlighting how accessibility manifests as a condition of the built environment; Calgary Ramps, photographs of improvised or broken ramps in city neighbourhoods; and Sand Ramps, ramps built from sand along the shoreline that erode with the rising tide, reflecting the fragile and conditional nature of accessibility.
2. My practice comes out of my own experience with disability. It shapes the way I notice and question access in the built environment. I’m especially interested in how something as simple as a ramp changes the way people move through public space – showing how design can include or exclude, and how public spaces are shaped by power and control.
3. I’m excited to connect with other artists and learn from their experiences with disability and access as it relates to the built environment in Korea. This collaboration is a chance for meaningful exchange across cultures, especially around accessibility, design, and how we imagine public space.

Mei Chan-Long

Mei Chan-Long

1. Creating is my language. My primary medium is sculpture, specifically steel, hand-sculpted with no heat, MIG welded, layered with reformed cement, and finished with pure pigments. My sculptures represent the ups and downs of life, and the need to keep moving through difficult times. Viewed from various angles the sculptures are dynamic, expressing different movements of life. I aim to express the constant flow and multiplicity of paths available to us. Different angles yield different perspectives. The flow of life is central – movement, living, and not being or feeling stuck.
2. I live with an acquired disability. After brain surgery I had to learn again: to find the words to speak, write, and read. I live with cognitive impairments, PTSD, and at times physical pain and impairment. Creating art has helped me through life since brain surgery. It was all I could do on my own for a period of time. I found creating time to be my time and my greatest therapy. It is my voice that allows me to speak with confidence through my creations.
3. I am hopeful this collaboration will be positive. Building cross cultural and artistic connections with others may be a path. As I understand it, Asians are usually quiet about disabilities. But I am hopeful it will strengthen us, create visibility for us, and have us grow as a community.

Laurie M. Landry

Laurie M. Landry, Sage Magic, 2023, oil on canvas

1. I’m a figurative painter with a focus on hands as a means of communications, whether it’s actually signing something, or as a gesture that conveys meaningful conversations with the viewer. I have several figurative paintings that will be featured in this exhibition. Some focus on body image and how we hide or reveal our ambiguous feelings about our own body. Others shine a spotlight on Deaf subjects signing their favourite words. One painting, Deaf Power / Manifeste du Surdisme, explores the iconographic nature of sign language, particularly ASL. Hands fascinate me because they’re so expressive – they can convey emotion, identity, and entire conversations without words. Each painting explores different aspects of this visual language.
2. Because I’m Deaf, my means of communication is largely visual, whether it’s observing the body language and facial expressions, and reading lips of the speaker, or communicating in sign language. Painting itself is a visual language, so it complements my mode of expression. This visual-first way of experiencing the world naturally influences how I compose my paintings. I’m drawn to capturing the subtle details in gesture and expression that hearing people might miss. My deafness isn’t a limitation; it’s given me a heightened sensitivity to visual communication that directly informs my art.
3. I think it’s a great opportunity to learn about the creative practices of other artists at an international level, especially artists who incorporate their disabilities into their practice, and to share and understand the joys and challenges of being an artist with disabilities. I’m particularly interested in how different cultural contexts shape the relationship between disability and art. I hope to both learn from the Korean artists’ approaches and share how Canadian Deaf culture influences my work. These cross-cultural exchanges often reveal universal themes while highlighting unique perspectives.

David Oppong

1. My art practice is about my imagination. I use my imagination and experiences to tell visual stories. I express my thoughts and feelings about current events, media, and relationships in my artwork. My piece, 10 Facts, is about an impending war, elections, and how the economy changes during war. Putin is in front of a background of fire that glows, there are explosions and bombs being thrown, everything is banging.
2. I think about my disability as I’m making my art. My imagination is strong because of my disability. I also think about my feelings while I’m making my art. I feel happy when I’m making art, and sometimes when I think I make a mistake or if something doesn’t look right, then I feel frustrated and want to correct it.
3. I’m excited about how this project is bringing people together. I hope to learn together about each other and our artwork. I hope to gain the experiences of showing my art to a wider audience, and getting to take part in meetings and interviews about art.

Johnny Tai

Johnny Tai, Rooster and Scorpion (Zodiac Series), 2024, metal etching

1. My art practice centers on tactile metal etching, a process I pioneered to create accessible works that are equally powerful to see and to touch. Using aluminum as my canvas, I inscribe intricate lines and textures that allow blind and sighted audiences alike to explore images through their fingertips. This practice bridges cultural and sensory divides, blending my Taiwanese heritage, lived experience as a blind and partially deaf artist, and a deep commitment to accessibility and inclusivity.For this exhibition, I will present three pieces from my Zodiac Crossroads series. This collection fuses Eastern and Western zodiac traditions, celebrating multiculturalism while reimagining symbolic narratives through a tactile lens. Each piece connects myth and accessibility, inviting audiences to engage with stories of resilience, duality, and courage.
2. My disability isn’t just something that happened to me – it’s the lens through which I see the world, and it bleeds into everything I create. Because I don’t see the way most people do, I feel and remember differently. My art ends up being deeply tactile, emotional, and sensory-driven. I carve and etch with an awareness of texture, weight, and space that comes from living in a world where touch, sound, and memory carry more meaning than sight.It also ties into my themes: resilience, intimacy, the line between fragility and strength. My art pushes back against the idea that disability is limitation. Instead, it’s an invitation to explore differently, to question assumptions, to touch what normally just gets looked at. In a way, my disability makes my art not just about me, but about the audience too. It asks them to interact with art in ways they don’t usually think of. Thus the relationship is intimate, almost inseparable: my disability doesn’t limit my art – it shapes it, makes it uniquely mine, gives it soul.
3. I hope this collaboration with the Korean artists will be an opportunity for true cultural and creative exchange. My work has always been about bridging divides – between sighted and blind, East and West, strength and vulnerability – and this project feels like a natural extension of that mission. By engaging with Korean artists who also live and create with disabilities, I look forward to sharing not only our artistic practices but also our lived experiences, methods of resilience, and visions of accessibility. I am especially inspired by the chance to learn from the long traditions of Korean art and storytelling, and to see how those narratives can enter into dialogue with my own Taiwanese heritage and Canadian perspective. I hope to exchange not just artworks, but ways of thinking and creating – whether that’s new tactile techniques, different cultural symbols, or approaches to making art accessible across sensory boundaries. Ultimately, I want to leave this collaboration with new relationships, expanded perspectives, and the beginnings of long-term connections between communities. For me, this isn’t just an exhibition – it’s a chance to weave together stories, cultures, and audiences into something stronger than any of us could create alone.