Drawing on an online ethnographic case study of a young Australian Aboriginal artist, ‘Kambarni’, this study explores how translanguaging can be understood through the negotiation of both playfulness and precarity. When this artist is online in his public social media Instagram account, he constructs his cultural identity artistically and multimodally, often in playful ways, represented through his art - reflecting his personal, social and political lived experiences; his strong alignment to his traditional culture; and his ability to walk with confidence in non-Aboriginal ‘youth’ society. Yet the monolingual ideological precarity is apparent as he rarely uses anything but Standard Australian English (SAE) on his public Instagram account, despite the fact that his Instagram account targets both an Indigenous and non-Aboriginal audience. When he is offline interacting ‘inside’ his own peer group, on the other hand, he employs translanguaging playfully and creatively, using varied resources such as SAE, Aboriginal English and traditional language lexicon. The authors, therefore, argue that translanguaging should be understood from its playfulness aspects within in-group communication, while it might lose its playfulness when it moves beyond its boundary and clashes with other ideological precarities such as judgements, stereotypes and racism against the Aboriginal people.