Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and educator whose practice moves across art, design, architecture, and civic process because the problems it engages do too. Their work addresses the conditions of shared life — how bodies are organized and governed, futures made available or foreclosed, ecologies tended or depleted — and builds material and procedural responses where institutions prove insufficient. Underlying this work is the recognition that conditions change people through the body — through barely articulable discomfort, through complex desire, through unnoticed habit — long before they are registered consciously. In collaboration with civic agencies, designers, scientists, and local communities, they develop counter-systems — civic assemblies, emergency architectures, spatial protocols, theoretical frameworks, parafictional organizations — for collective improvisation, multispecies cohabitation, and other forms of participation existing orders cannot accommodate.
Current work includes One Million Counterextinctions, a multi-stage civic project (with the Alachua County Office of Resiliency) that equips non-expert publics to design multispecies infrastructure for a climate-shifted 2045, generating public gatherings, functional installations, and a bottom-up archive of design proposals for nonhuman futures that current infrastructure does not account for. Cheung also works through the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III), a counter-architectural firm that builds provisional environments for tender and strange forms of sociality, as well as nonhumanities, an artist collective (with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick) that engages disinvested and ecologically degraded sites through installation, performance, and video.
Cheung’s writing theorizes what their practice enacts: how conditions shape what bodies can feel, want, and do, and the affective and political mechanisms that make those conditions stick. Recent essays include "On the Signature Block; or, the Loss of an Inadequate Political Possibility" (Social Text, forthcoming), "What Cringe Knows" (Broadcast at Pioneer Works, forthcoming), and "Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot" (Asia Art Archive, 2025). They are also completing Making Unseizable, a book manuscript that develops, through historical case studies, a design ethics for commoning under conditions of administrative capture.
Cheung is Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media in the School of Art + Art History and Affiliate Faculty in Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. Previously, they taught at the University of Virginia, where they served as Head of Sculpture from 2022 to 2024, and at Colorado College. They are also co-editor, with Paul Fermin, of a forthcoming series on AI and aesthetics for Asia Art Archive. Cheung holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the 2021 Eldon Danhausen Fellow in Sculpture, as well as a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Philosophy from Alfred University. They have exhibited in the US, Canada, France, and China, at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Mana Contemporary, the New York State Museum, and the Monira Foundation.
Cheung's abridged CV is available here; a full CV is available upon request. You can email them at conradcheung@ufl.edu.
