State of the Art: Don't Call Yung Lean's Art Show a Side Quest
In State of the Art, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas untangles the crossover between fashion and art.
If the words “Drain Gang,” “Ginseng Strip 2002,” and “melancholic cloud rap” mean nothing to you, there’s little chance you’d know Yung Lean. Much less Jonatan Leandoer Håstad.
This all changes on September 25 with “Collected Works 2016-2026,” where the Swedish rapper will unveil a selection of pieces that he’s quietly produced in the shadow of his music career. Traditional, honest-to-god art spanning painting and sculpture, drawings and dioramas, a site-specific installation and short film, executive-produced by and starring Håstad.
Together, the works feel almost literally childlike. There are blobby, clownlike ceramic figures (El Jefe), a dioramic tableau that looks stolen from a school art fair (Gubben i Lådan), and crude paintings of masklike figures in nature (Perfekt Dejt and Vitabergsparken, named for Stockholm’s famous public hilltop park). The scrappiness that defined his early rap career — lo-fi, SoundCloud-ready, emotionally unconstrained — filters through, befitting the fact that, like his musical talents, he’s entirely self-taught.
Having so much work to his name is mildly surprising given that beyond his sonic output, mentions of any kind of other creative practice had largely been limited to offhand lines in interviews. You’d need to be paying close attention to know he paints “caveman shit” or does ceramics.
Still, the move fits the chameleon-like cultural moment. Musicians are actors now, and actors are artists, etc. etc. You’re just as likely to see Charli XCX soundtrack a film, for example, as to star in one. We live in a world where, for a mercifully brief stint, you could go to an art gallery to see The Brutalist star Adrien Brody’s (truly horrendous) paintings or to a car park to see Ed Sheeran cosplay as Jackson Pollock.
Within this context, a Yung Lean art show makes sense, but it also stands out. Whereas other pivots into a new medium often produce subpar results that can feel soulless — see: Charli’s wooden acting, or the souvenir shop-quality of Brody’s “pop art” — the crude, childlike art that Håstad has produced is quite literally rooted in his adolescence. “I've made wooden sculptures and drawings and paintings since I was a kid,” Håstad explained in the show’s press release. “Just like my songs, the work is made through stream of consciousness. I go where the hand takes me.”
This hand brought him to spray paint as a young teenager living for a few years in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he graffitied under the name Verp, and more recently to adidas. The footwear label’s Stan Smith pop-up at Paris Fashion Week in June saw Håstad live-paint a wall mural (in a custom adidas jumpsuit, naturally). At the time, the performance art piece felt a bit random, but now looks like an amuse-bouche to his upcoming art show.
Publicly displaying a decade’s worth of pieces signals how far Håstad has come since surviving teenage stardom, including a drug-induced psychiatric break at 18. The artist turned 30 in July, and alongside his art show, he’s also set to make his film debut in Sacrifice (also starring Charli herself), releasing stateside in October.
Consider “Collected Works 2016-2026” the coronation of a new era for Håstad, unconstrained by any one medium. As he said of his works: “My paintings mean nothing and also everything. Here they are."
Yung Lean, the rapper, has been called “your favorite artist’s favorite artist’s favorite artist” by the New York Times. But now, by pulling back the curtain on his self-taught art practice, he might just live up to that moniker in all senses of the word.
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