Conrad Cheung (b. 1996, Canada) is an artist and educator working across installation, performance, architecture, video, VR, and more. Drawing on histories of institutional critique, experimental architecture, and alternative theater, their practice attends to the politics of spatial and epistemic systems. It examines in particular the operations of the built environment — its governance of bodies and publics, its materialization of claims to sovereignty and difference (across humans, nations, species), and its status as a living archive of how ideology and capital mutate and circulate globally.
In response, Cheung's practice asks how we might carve out zones, even if momentarily, for anarchic, queer, and interspecies forms of surviving, unlearning, and communing. What material infrastructures and reconfigurations of care, desire, and normativity might allow for the emergence of eclectic new publics, reimaginings of resistance and refusal, and experiments in living differently with others, especially others who may be politically illegible or other-than-human? Cheung's interventions are typically driven by strategies of parafiction, participation, and site-specificity, and bear political commitments to enactment at the scales of architecture and body.
Cheung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and affiliate faculty in the Environmental Thought and Practice program at the University of Virginia. 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 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 Monira Foundation, the New York State Museum, and the Violet Crown. Cheung’s practice is committed to transdisciplinary collaboration across creative and academic fields. They currently work under the corporate alias The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures with a rotating cast of collaborators, under several fictional identities for intervention in far-right and conspiracist circles, and as the artist collective nonhumanities with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick.
You can find Cheung’s CV here, and you can reach them at conradcheung@virginia.edu.