Artist Gao Youjun Creates Clever Illustrations That Are A Joy To Look Through

Chinese artist Gao Youjun, more popularly known as Shanghai Tango on social media, creates clever illustrations that look incredibly simple yet witty. This prolific doodler makes clever use of lines and shading to make imaginative drawings that are sure to tickle your brain and make you crack a smile.

Most of Tango’s clever illustrations are in comic form mostly depicting people, animals, and everyday objects illustrated in a sequential art that ultimately take the most unexpected turns. A drawing of a man fishing from a bridge and finally catching a fish may seem so simple at first glance. But if you try to look closely at the second drawing, you’ll discern that the shape of the fishing rod and the footbridge have together formed a grand piano.

Clever Illustrations With Straightforward Metaphors Hidden In Them

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In addition to beguiling optical illusions, Tango’s clever illustrations also play around with cultural criticism, current events, and sometime politics. And he has done so with great sense of humor and straightforward metaphor embedded in his drawings. Shanghai Tango has worked in advertising since 1995 and now runs his own agency. In 2010, a friend challenged him to draw quirky cartoons and and asked him to post them on Weibo, a popular social media site in China. The challenge was to create and post one illustration every day that specifically pokes fun at the oddities of modern life.

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And that’s how his series of clever illustrations started and later became so popular. A barcode jumping off a building and ending up jumbled into a QR code, a bladesmith forging a Chanel logo into Under Armour logo, and redesigning the Olympic rings into its Covid-19 version. These witty drawings are guaranteed to make you chortle. We’ve compiled some of his most humorous drawings so far. The Chinese artist also has an Instagram page so you might want to follow his page to get updated on his latest creations.