K-ART FOCUS For Seok Chang-woo, painting opened world beyond his dreams

It was lunchtime on Oct. 29, 1984. Seok Chang-woo, a 29-year-old electrical technician with a young daughter and a newborn son, was inspecting electrical equipment at work.

He climbed up to clean one remaining spot, then everything went blank. When he regained consciousness, he was in intensive care. Electrocuted by an astonishing 22,900 volts, Seok was hospitalized for a year and a half and lost both of his arms and two toes.

On Feb. 1, 1988, four years later, his son, who turned four, carried a drawing pad to his mother and asked her to draw a bird. Busy with housework, she told him to ask his father.

Realizing what she had said, she hurried into his room. She saw Seok fitting a pencil into the hook of his prosthesis and was drawing an eagle from a bird guide.

“Wow, Dad, it looks like a real bird,” his son exclaimed.

Encouraged, Seok drew more: sparrows, magpies and swallows, then cartoon characters. What began as something to do for his child became a practice that would carry him toward calligraphy, figure drawing and eventually, expansive abstractions drawn with his whole body.

Finding a language in ink

That development is the subject of exhibition, “Chang-woo Seok: Question Marks at the Fingertips,” running through Dec. 5 at Modu Art Space near Seoul Station. The title refers to his curved prosthetic hooks, but also the questions that have propelled his work.

Curator Park Si-nae wanted to move beyond the familiar framing of an artist painting after losing his arms.

“His work is too outstanding to be consumed only as a source of inspiration,” she said recently. “Disability cannot be erased from his life, but how else can we understand beyond a narrative of overcoming it?”

Seok’s wife, Kwak Hye-sook, helped open the way — not only by supporting their household and daily life, but by introducing him to the world in which he would build his practice.

Kwak and Seo had met as colleagues and dated for three years before marrying. After the accident, her response was practical: “Then I’ll have to work.” She earned a living while he developed his art, sustaining a partnership that included both everyday assistance and an insistence that his work be taken seriously.

“His teacher is his wife,” journalist and longtime friend Baek Jong-hwan says in an exhibition video. Kwak took up calligraphy first, bringing the brush into their lives, and helped persuade calligrapher Yeo Tae-myeong to accept Seok as a student.

Movement beyond the dream

Nude sketching classes sharpened his interest in the human body. Combining calligraphic brushwork with croquis — rapid observational drawing — he developed a distinctive style.

Years of practice sheets show detailed bodies becoming increasingly abstracted, concentrated in a few strokes.

Athletes offered especially vivid subjects. Studying competition footage repeatedly, he sought the instant when the speed and energy became most visible in sports events. In “Yuna Kim’s Triple Lutz,” (2014), the skater’s momentum unfolds across nearly 5 meters of paper.

The painting records Seok’s movement, too. Working over paper spread on the floor, he bends and turns, guiding the brush with his whole body. As curator Park explained, the image is both a record of an athlete’s motion and of the artist’s physical response to it.

That relationship between drawing and movement took his work beyond the studio. Solo exhibitions in France, Germany and Britain in 2001 and 2002 provided occasions to develop live drawing performances overseas. He went on to perform at the closing ceremonies of the 2014 Sochi and 2018 PyeongChang Winter Paralympics, bringing his sweeping ink works to an international stage.

For years after the accident, his dreams supplied movement unavailable to him while awake. In his dreams, he had both hands for things like fishing and driving.

“As I became able to express myself through my work, those dreams disappeared,” he said.

The change unfolded over more than a decade. Painting gave those unfulfilled movements another form.

During a 2019 journey to Europe, Seok looked down at a crowd gathered for a horse race at a festival in Siena, Italy. From above, he could really only see people's heads, but he sensed the movement below.

“I realized I didn’t have to depict everything,” he said. “Even just the heads could convey the movement.”

At a flower festival in Spello, Italy, flower petals arranged across streets awakened an interest in color he wanted to pursue more fully. Those encounters informed abstractions in which dots and shifting densities replace recognizable figures.

“What he has always wanted to express is movement and flow,” Park said, explaining that abstractions extend that inquiry, rather than abandoning it.

Life still being explored

Seok’s diaries displayed in the exhibition reveal a voice as humorous and attentive in everyday moments.

Watching his wife fall asleep with her head resting on his prosthesis brought to mind the familiar intimacy of offering her his arm as a pillow. He also writes affectionately to worn-out protheses, promising to preserve them as treasures before getting new ones, and revises his understanding of pain after an unexpectedly punishing toothache.

Other entries describe the satisfaction of figuring things out for himself. Not long after leaving the hospital, he was home alone and thirsty when he spotted a beer bottle beside a water container. He gripped the bottle with his toes, worked a bottle opener into place and spent about 30 minutes trying to lift the cap. Eventually, he learned to remove a bottle cap in just a few seconds.

“I have enjoyed learning things one at a time, and I still do,” he wrote.

That humor does not obscure his support needs. In an essay explaining what people should know before meeting him, he describes needing assistance with dressing, eating and travel. The essay is a practical invitation to understand his daily life, rather than assume either helplessness or complete independence.

Asked whether he would want his arms back, he responds with another joke: Life is good enough now, and having arms again would mean doing everything himself. He humorously calls whoever sits to his right side his “right arm.”

In an exhibition video, Father Marco Choi Min-ho, a longtime traveling companion, described the artist as always proposing another place to draw, from pilgrimage sites to mountain tops.

“To me, he is not just someone with a disability, but someone who challenges himself, someone diligent and sincere,” Choi says.

Seok does not insist that viewers extract a lesson from that life.

“I work for my own satisfaction, because I need to,” he said. “My hope is that people encounter the work and feel something according to their own circumstances.”

“Chang-woo Seok: Question Marks at the Fingertips” runs through Dec. 5.