Hong Kong artist Cath Love on body image, graffiti as art and her TEDx Salon talk

The Hong Kong-raised child of Swiss and Thai parents whose work mashes up Asian illustration with hip hop-influenced street art, Cath Love captures our city’s East-West zeitgeist pretty much perfectly. The artist, real name Catherine Grossrieder, yokes together two apparently incompatible elements, one Eastern and one Western, one cute and one gritty, in work that is bold, graphical and accessible but also spiked with a subversive surrealism.

Love first made her name as a street artist, and is now an in-demand artist and illustrator, whose most famous creation, curvaceous cartoon icon Jeliboo, is starting to take on a life of her own. Jeliboo is classic Love: originally drawn doing yoga poses, she is cute and whimsical, but is also a vehicle for challenging stereotypes of female representation: specifically, skinniness. Hiding the character’s eyes behind a lengthy fringe only increases the emphasis on her body, which is a thing of contrast, with very curvy thighs and rear (her name is a combination of the words “jelly” and “booty”) alongside tiny, delicate feet and hands.

The artist says that Jeliboo’s shape is in part a reflection of hip-hop culture’s emphasis on the merits of a fuller female body shape. “But I’m also rebelling against the Asian perception of beauty. She’s cute, bouncy, fun,” she says, as ever talking about her creation as if she’s a real person.