Plum Gallery has always had an indie bent, regularly showing work without big money art market appeal, but the current show is especially, ambitiously unpretentious. Nial O’Connor’s “Football Tribes” is a series of conté drawings on brown packing paper. The works introduce an ancient fighting force of skateboarding soccer players gathered from around the world to fend off a non-native species that threatens their environment. Yes, you read that right.

“Football Tribes” could easily have been a teenaged daydream doodle or the storyboard for a video game’s opening sequence instead of an art exhibition. As it happens, the exhibition is just one manifestation of O’Connor’s vision. “This is actually a very small part of a larger master plan – a football comic,” he says. “I’ve been working on it for ten years, putting away sketches.” 

“I guess the thing that identifies my style as mine more than anything else is anything that’s sort of flowing and syrupy and curves”

The themes are an unabashed assembly of the artist’s own interests and experiences. O’Connor has been an avid football player and skateboarder, and his childhood in Australia provided the inspiration for the bad guys, the “tuzichipinguoren” (or apple eating rabbit people). “That comes directly from watching videos in black and white in school with thousands of rabbits jumping around, and the myxomatosis that covered their eyes,” he says.

There’s a myxamatosis-ish quality to the DIY feel of O’Connor’s work too: it’s infectious. That’s something Nicole Teng, who runs Plum, is trying to engender. “For fine art you can find it in all the galleries maybe in Moganshan Lu, maybe in Hong Fang, any kind of place. But this is another kind of art which is more approachable, more about lifestyle. People can easily understand it, and get some ideas and bring them back to your daily life,” she says.

O’Connor demonstrated just how approachable the 'Football Tribes' work is when we visited Plum, happily pushing his finger across the surface of a drawing to demonstrate how he smears it. (He uses an eraser to create some of the crisper lines.)

Accessible as the work is, it isn’t amateurish. The drawings are exuberant and full of movement, which comes from a combination of comic book semiotics and a calligrapher’s devotion to curls. “I guess the thing that identifies my style as mine more than anything else is anything that’s sort of flowing and syrupy and curves,” he says.

O’Connor works as an illustrator and artist, and he’s currently redesigning the mascot for a major restaurant-bar chain in Shanghai. He’s also showing landscape paintings – Chinese subjects displaced to Australian landscapes – at a group show at Art + that opened on 1 July.

In the exhibition at Plum, however, he isn’t working to a client’s brief or a curator’s vision. “It’s purely self indulgent. This story is stuff that I like, and I’m putting in, and I’m not asking anyone for permission,” he says with just a hint of the pleasure that comes from getting away with something.

Teng is conscious of the financial costs of creating a platform for this sort of creative freedom. “We need to sell artwork to survive,” she says. “We also need to sell some merchandising to survive. We also sell coffee just to survive. If we can support ourselves to sell artwork only I would rather not do the rest of those things. But the merchandising side of things is still meaningful for us.”

For 'Football Tribes' O’Connor created supporters’ buttons (RMB 8 each) for 16 of the teams in the World Cup. There’s still time to get one before the final on 11 July.

Football Tribes. Until 25 July. Plum Gallery, Bldg 37, 1025 Nanjing Xi Lu. Tel: 5213 6565