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. 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 developed in partnership with the Alachua County Office of Resiliency, in which communities 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 with a rotating cast of collaborators, as well as nonhumanities, an artist collective (with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick) that engages marginalized sites through installation, performance, and video. Cheung’s recent writing addresses the structural conditions their practice builds within. This includes "Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot" (Asia Art Archive, 2025), on the political economy of collective pleasure and exhaustion under platform capitalism, and Making Unseizable, a book-length manuscript that charts how commons have historically been, and might today be, structured to resist capture.
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. 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 CV is available here; a full CV is available upon request. You can email them at conradcheung@ufl.edu.
