Robin Rhode chalks things on to walls then plays with them. He draws a bicycle and rides it, heaves a boat up a ramp, tries to blow out a chalk candle, juggles with charcoal balls. The young South African artist, now living in Berlin and a rising talent on the international art scene, creates a sort of living cartoon from pavements, streets and city walls, using them as his ‘paper’, the backdrop for performances he captures on film or in photographic series.

The resulting works are slick and witty yet grapple with gritty issues like identity, poverty and politics. And they can be seen in Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who on the top floor of London’s Hayward Gallery (while Warhol resides in its lower galleries), as well as outside on the Southbank until December 7).

You can’t help but smile at his slapstick antics. It’s fun to follow the ‘storyboards’, to see that skateboarder in Catch Air deftly skimming along a chalk drainpipe ramp, gathering speed as he finally makes the ‘jump’. Or, those boys in New Kids on the Bike, one black and one white, clinging on to the handlebars of a speeding bike as their books spill out from their bags. Or, that car he washes and thereby erases.

But behind the jokes lie tougher messages. In Untitled (Hard Rain) (2005), he uses an umbrella to protect himself from a painted heavy downpour. The artist leaves the scene; the rain remains, as does artist and umbrella’s impact. Made on a derelict wall in Hiroshima, Japan, it ineluctably harks back to the radioactive black rain that fell 60 years before.

His ideas stem from childhood experiences. “From a young age, I’d use any struggle as a way to become inspired . . . putting myself in a situation from which I had to imagine a way out.”

Without knowing it,, an initiation ritual at Rhode’s Johannesburg high school helped fire his imagination. Senior boys using stolen chalk would draw an object on the walls of the toilets and force youngster to interact with it, such as blowing out the candle or riding the bicycle.

An unusual bike features in this exhibition: a soap sculpture left to dissolve in the English weather on an outdoor sculpture court. It may still be there when you visit.