Crowds from China to New York wowed by kinetic rickshaw sculpture from eccentric French artist

If there’s one thing more common in Beijing’s labyrinth of hutongs than a bearded foreigner, it’s the tricycle. The former tend to be bohemian castaways taking advantage of the capital’s creative climate, the latter, low-cost vehicles first imported from British India and immortalised in novelist Lao She’s homage to Beijing, Rickshaw Boy (1937). The common incarnation today is the sanlunche, a pedal or electric-powered trike used to traffic wares through the hutongs (and get in the way of pedestrians).

Remarkably, these quirky commonalities of life in the capital have forged a partnership that has travelled the world.

I rendezvous with French artist Niko de La Faye at Cafe Zarah, a hipster haunt set in an old courtyard in Beijing’s Dongcheng district. A familiar figure in the city’s live-music venues, de La Faye is usually exotically clad – in a military over­coat, perhaps, or a woollen panda hat. Today, his shirt-and-shorts combo is relatively low-key, although he arrives wear­ing two pairs of glasses, a congenial grin evident beneath a beard that might have been borrowed from a square-jawed Cossack.

“I’m a kinetic sculptor, among other things,” de La Faye explains of his somewhat perplexing obsession, before elaborating. “It’s a concept of bringing movement to art and then taking it into the everyday lives of people. “I’m not the kind of artist who likes to hide away in his studio.”

That’s something of an understatement when you consider he has taken his work into the lives of people in Hong Kong, Paris and New York thus far.

“I was uninspired as a teenager,” says de La Faye, of a youth spent in France – Brest, Paris and the Loire Valley. He studied business in Bordeaux, graduating in 2001, but, still unsure of his life’s true calling, decided to travel the world as a kite surfer. He eventually landed in San Francisco, in the United States.