Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and educator who builds counter-systems — spatial, ecological, procedural — designed to widen the commons by shifting who can participate and what relations can take shape, especially under conditions of crisis. Working across installation, performance, video, civic practice, and critical writing, Cheung tracks how space operates as a tool of governance: it organizes bodies, formats attention, distributes access, and quietly decides whose futures, human and nonhuman, can be imagined. Through participatory and research-based interventions, their practice produces infrastructures — architectures, protocols, events, furniture — that make room for strange collaborations, multispecies cohabitations, and forms of gathering, refusal, and care that existing orders are not built to accommodate.
Drawing on histories of experimental architecture, alternative theater, and institutional critique, Cheung often works through parafictional and collaborative frames, including the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (a counter-architectural firm with a rotating cast of collaborators), nonhumanities (with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick), and performed personae in public spaces. Current projects include One Million Counterextinctions, a three-stage civic art project launched in partnership with the Alachua County Office of Resiliency that collaborates with communities to design emergency infrastructure for nonhuman species in a climate-shifted 2045. Cheung's writing includes essays in cultural criticism, most recently "Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot," which follows the libidinal economies of digital platforms — softness, deferral, exhaustion — and asks what kinds of attention, agency, and collectivity remain possible inside them.
Cheung is Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media in the School of Art + Art History 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 hold 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. Their work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Mana Contemporary, the New York State Museum, and the Monira Foundation, and their writing has appeared with Asia Art Archive and the Public Media Institute.
Cheung's CV is available here; a full CV is available upon request. You can email them at conradcheung@ufl.edu.
