“Identity plays a huge role in the work I make and the way I understand and navigate the world.”
Symbols That Refuse to Stay Still
Lauren YS creates images that feel alive with pressure, movement, and inner weather. Based in Los Angeles and also known as Lauren YoungSmith, they have built a practice across murals, fine art, illustration, animation, and installation. Their work carries the urgency of street art while drawing from literature, teaching, writing, comics, dreams, death, love, sex, psychedelia, mythology, and Asian-American heritage.
Their path into art was not a sudden transformation but a long accumulation of practice, survival, and self-recognition. Lauren began painting murals around 2014, yet they had already been making art long before that point. For them, becoming an artist was less a single declaration than the gradual realization that art had become the structure of their life.
Identity sits at the center of their visual language. Lauren describes their practice as deeply shaped by the ways they move through the world as a queer, mixed Chinese-American, gender-fluid person. Their figures, symbols, and imagined environments become spaces where ancestry, selfhood, belonging, and transformation can be examined without reducing them to simple answers.
Lauren YS: Between Ancestry and Invention
Lauren’s connection to Asian-American history and family memory gives their work emotional depth. They often explore the complexity of remaining connected to ancestry while living in contemporary America. Rather than presenting heritage as a fixed inheritance, they treat it as something shifting, intimate, and sometimes difficult to hold.
Their visual worlds often include femme figures, hybrid beings, mythic characters, and enclosed spaces that suggest safety, mystery, and psychological interiority. Bottles, rooms, symbols, animals, and invented signs appear as containers for memory and feeling. These motifs allow Lauren to speak about grief, protection, cultural distance, and the private architectures people build within themselves.
The influence of their late grandmother, their popo, has also shaped this language of remembrance. Objects, stories, and fragments connected to family history have entered their images alongside imagined scripts and symbols. In this way, Lauren’s work becomes both personal and expansive, tracing how memory survives through image, invention, and emotional association.
A Muralscape of Queerness, Freedom, and Place
Lauren’s mural practice is rooted in responsiveness. Their large-scale works are not simply studio images enlarged onto walls; they absorb the energy of the site, the community, and the moment of creation. Freehand painting gives them room to adapt, revise, and let the surrounding environment influence the final composition.
Queerness is one of the strongest forces in their work. Lauren often investigates freedom, fluidity, selfhood, and the evolving nature of identity through figures that resist stable definitions. Their characters are strange, powerful, vulnerable, and complex, offering alternatives to conventional representations of beauty, gender, and embodiment.
One especially meaningful work is “Finding Home,” a mural created with spray paint at the Asian American Cultural Center at Yale University. The piece explored activism, diasporic connection, and pride within the Asian-American community. Its importance lies in how it gathers personal identity, collective history, and public space into one charged visual statement.
Lauren YS: Building Worlds Beyond the Wall
Lauren’s practice has expanded internationally through residencies, exhibitions, festivals, murals, and immersive projects. They completed a residency and solo exhibition at Nychos’ Rabbit Eye Movement studio in Vienna and have participated in major art events including Art Basel Miami, Pow!Wow! Hawaii, PangeaSeed SeaWalls in New Zealand, Pow!Wow! Long Beach, and Wallskar Festival China.
Their murals have appeared in locations such as the Long Beach Museum of Art and the World Trade Center in New York, while their gallery presence spans cities including Vienna, New York, London, Tokyo, and Melbourne. This global movement has strengthened the adaptability of their practice, allowing each project to become a meeting point between personal mythology and public encounter.
Their installation “Ancestral Crypt” at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return extended their vision into an immersive environment focused on evolving identity, Chinese-American heritage, nonbinary experience, and communication with ancestors. Lauren is now working on a large installation for a new Los Angeles space, continuing a practice where walls, symbols, bodies, and memories become vessels for possibility.
