These punchy illustrations show our addiction to social media

DESIGN OF THE WEEK

Fine artist, illustrator, designer and Insta-inspiration Neo Mahlangu is living a very different life from the young woman from Ga-Rankuwa who studied medical sciences after school.

The artist wields equal measures of style and social relevance in her growing body of work that spans genres and disciplines.

We particularly love her sugar-inspired works that call out the double standards and secret powers of social media.

In Cadbury-Insta a chocolate bar becomes a feed on social media, yummy but bad for you.

In Bowl-of-Likes, which recently went up on Mahlangu’s rather lit Instagram account, social media likes are equated to the addictive power of sugar. In Cadbury-Insta a chocolate bar becomes a feed on social media, yummy but bad for you.

This prescient and punchy illustration, gorgeously minimal and shiny, shows that social media is an addiction, a kind of mirror feeding the user’s ego with an empty diet

. You can follow the latest work on her Instagram account at @nenemahlangu