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, ecologies tended or depleted, futures made available or foreclosed. In collaboration with civic agencies, designers, scientists, and local communities, they develop counter-systems — civic assemblies, nonhuman architectures, spatial protocols, parafictional organizations and actors — for collective improvisation, multispecies cohabitation, and other forms of participation existing orders cannot accommodate.
Ongoing projects include One Million Counterextinctions, a multi-year civic collaboration with Alachua County government that equips non-expert publics to design multispecies infrastructure for a climate-shifted 2045, and a forthcoming public work with the Hippodrome Theatre that converts its neoclassical facade in the center of downtown Gainesville into thermochromic surfaces that reveal and conceal children's drawings with the movement of sunlight, accompanied by musical performance. Across projects, Cheung often works through collaborative platforms, including the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III), a counter-architectural firm that builds provisional environments for tender and feral 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 first book, Making Unseizable, on the design of collective forms that can resist institutional capture under hostile governance, is forthcoming from MIT Press. 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). 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.
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, the Harn Museum of Art, 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.
