Caricature, caricature and more caricature is the best way to describe the cycling art of Meijia Xu.
The Chinese ex-patriot, who now lives in New York, demonstrates her ability to take common facial and body expressions, juxtaposed with everyday objects, and turn them into bold images that portray an equally bold statement.
In her words:
If I consider illustration as a bowl of food for other illustrators, their bowls are full of strawberries, lemons, bananas, ice cream, tomatoes, beans, and so on. Viewers are willing to try more illustrations with “familiar” tastes. As for my bowl, it is full of planets, glass fragments, unknown creatures, bugs, food crumbs, mixed wild vegetables, colorful batteries and some stuff that is inedible. Everyone is welcome to eat my “illustrations” with a little more braveness. Of course it is a worthwhile choice because they will have extraordinary experience.
In her series of cycling illustrations titled Bicycle Zine, Xu begins by creating seemingly playful images before distributing them across the paper with a sense of abandon that borders the prurient, which in the end suggests that cycling isn’t alway a family show.
You decide.
Meijia Xu
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