Live, LOL, Love is a critical exhibition that explores how resident artists from the Yarra Youth Centre–Aisyah Kirana, F3ral, Mas, and duo 2 Halves as A Whole–negotiate sincerity and performance within the white cube. Featuring a distillation of the artists’ year-long practice and practise, each navigates what it costs to make art meaningfully (and playfully!) in subversion of institutional expectations. A multidisciplinary body of work–including sculpture, assemblage, screen, and performance–reveals the friction between emotional labour and commercial demand, professional artifice and truth-telling, and the isolating pressures of artistic production versus the intrinsic desire for community.

Though their material approaches diverge, each artist cultivates an intimate rapport with viewers, appealing to personhood through aesthetic nostalgia and thematic play. Their works attend vulnerable, universal human experiences–sleeping, coming-of-age, performing the role of “adult,” of “accomplished,” and of “artist.” What emerges is a shared language of tenderness and self‑reflection, giving the exhibition’s title a wry openness that holds both earnestness and irony at once. Live, LOL, Love traces the idiosyncratic, humorous, and heartfelt terrain where contemporary art is lived experience.