What Ton Mak Hid Inside a Running Shoe

White sneakers before the trend felt almost contrarian—back when neon yellow Air Max were the default and clean white canvas read as your grandfather’s choice. I was deep into them anyway, long before every other person on the street showed up wearing the same pair. Which is fine, but it does push you toward finding ways to stay interesting within the constraint. Ton Mak’s work for Nike is one answer to that problem.

Mak was born in Hong Kong, lives in Shanghai, and is better known online as Flabjacks. She took Nike’s Free RN as her canvas for the "Free Expression" series and covered it in color, pattern, and dense little doodles. The result is a white shoe that keeps being white while somehow also being extremely busy—small characters and shapes packed in everywhere, each one rewarding a longer look.

Mak studied anthropology at University College London, where she started drawing the small figures and stories that became the Flabjacks universe. The work always looks playful and cute at first glance, but there’s something more compressed underneath—emotion, anxiety, longing, all of it tucked into cartoon shapes. The sneaker carries that same quality. Something sweet on the surface with a lot more going on if you slow down. It’s available at Nike, though something tells me the point was never really the shoe.