Every year, Mitsubishi Electric Building Techno-Service Co., Ltd. sponsors "Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World Exhibition" throughout Japan. As the title indicates, the exhibition features paintings by artists around the world who are deprived of the use of their hands, and thus paint using their mouths or feet to hold a paintbrush.
The company encountered paintings drawn by artists belonging to the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World for the first time in 1991, when it purchased paintings to put on the wall of a lodging attached to a training facility in Kodaira city, Tokyo. Employees who saw these paintings were so impressed with the pieces that were laboriously painted by artists who paint with brushes held in their mouths and feet, that they hosted an informal painting exhibition in the training facility in 1992. The response to this exhibition was so overwhelmingly positive that it came to be held throughout Japan starting in 1994. Promotional activities for the event are being continued by volunteers including the company employees and their families.
