“Shanghai is absolutely full of cyclists. It doesn’t have Toronto’s rules, so everyone bikes.” Toronto-based artist Tao is telling me how bikes slipped into her artistic repertoire. She grew up in Shanghai, where cycling is ubiquitous and although, “there are too many cars in Toronto,” during the summer she commutes to work by bike every day. “When you do art, you just [include] everything around you,” she explains.

Tao tells me that she went to art school and studied broadcast design and now works as a motion-graphic designer, creating backgrounds for commercials. She began screen printing T-shirts and napkins as a hobby two years ago and produced her first monochromatic bike image: a retro, upright, rider-less girls’ style chopper, trailing bits behind as if it just autonomously busted through a window and came to a slamming stop in front of you, ready for you to swing your heeled foot and set your skirted hips down on its banana seat for a slow ride through Kensington.

Tao recently combined hobbies and began designing organic soaps, imprinting them with bike designs for Hotshot Gallery in Kensington. She incorporated an olfactory twist by adding essential oils for aroma-therapeutic effects. In addition to bike motifs, she created two series of soaps: the first one is a food sequence in the shapes of sushi, chocolate cake topped with delicate rolls and key lime pie; the other is an ink-and-water-color sequence in which she combines timing, colored inks and layers to create painting-like effects.

Her next bike-based project will involve pencil sketching and “origami bikes.” Tao has a new website, blueswan.ca, and can be reached at tao@designsparks.ca for product sales and regarding shows in the Toronto area.