U-Haul Art Fair 2026

Participating in the U-Haul Art Fair for the first time, Southern Guild presents If You’re Not Having Fun, You’re Not Doing It Right by artist Nano Le Face. Installed inside a rented moving truck, the presentation features framed and unframed drawings alongside limited-edition, hand-altered clothing, embracing the fair’s unconventional, street-side format and Le Face’s instinctive approach to art-making beyond the gallery frame.

The fair’s unconventional model transforms U-Haul trucks into makeshift exhibition spaces, challenging the financial and infrastructural conventions of the traditional art fair while bringing art directly onto the streets of Chelsea. Its DIY ethos finds a natural counterpoint in Le Face’s practice, which is similarly grounded in resourcefulness, accessibility, and an irreverence towards established ideas of how art should be made and presented. A self-taught artist who studied Film Arts before turning to contemporary art, Le Face works primarily in pencil, crayon, and marker, developing his distinctive visual language in 2020 when he ran out of painting materials and began working with whatever he could find. Found paper, discarded drawings, handwritten text, mistakes, and revisions have since become integral to a practice shaped by improvisation, accumulation, and reuse.

Fashion imagery, film, cartoons, celebrity culture, advertising, song lyrics, and internet detritus collide across Le Face’s work. His recurring cast of stylized female figures inhabits a world of heightened aspiration and self-consciousness, where glamour, beauty, hedonistic pleasure, and success coexist uneasily with insecurity, loneliness, and existential doubt. Le Face deliberately amplifies these opposing states to the point of hyperbole, using humor and melodrama to probe the unstable distance between the identities we perform and the private vulnerabilities that lie beneath them.

Text is integral to this visual language. Fragments of conversation, confessions, jokes, aphorisms, and appropriated phrases operate variously as dialogue, internal monologue, punchline, and narration, while familiar brands and consumer symbols are sampled, distorted, and recombined. Le Face gathers these references indiscriminately from his surroundings. Rather than resolving into fixed narratives, image and language accumulate associations, inviting viewers to make their own connections between seemingly disparate cultural fragments.

In If You’re Not Having Fun, You’re Not Doing It Right, this vocabulary migrates from his drawings to clothing, transforming garments through cutting, stitching, patching, drawing, and painting into singular
wearable works. Logos, slogans, recurring characters, and graphic motifs move freely between paper and fabric, further dissolving distinctions between artwork and everyday object.

For Le Face, who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, bringing his work to New York marks a significant expansion of a practice developed largely in his childhood bedroom in Tshwane. Yet, the encounter he proposes remains deliberately unprecious. Rather than prescribing how the works should be read, he invites viewers to look, laugh, speculate, and make connections of their own.