With a brush in beteween his toes, or in his mouth, Karipbek Kuyukov has not let a disability stop him from becoming a world renowned artist.
It's just how he was born.
"My mother was in shock for a long time. I wasn't shown to her for three days or so. And the father said that I would survive because I was alive and could move my legs."
He was born in a small village in northeast Kazakhstan where local entertainment included watching the Soviet Union test nuclear bombs throughout the Cold War.
Little did residents know, the testing posed a number of dangers.
"They would go up the hill and watch how the sand would rise to the sky as a black smoke. In those days of course there were instructions that stated that people (in the vicinity of the test) should lie on the ground and cover themselves with something, but it was a spectacular show and people wanted to see it."
Rates of cancer, mental illness and fertility problems there are among the highest i
