Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and educator who builds counter-systems — spatial, ecological, and procedural — that expand the commons by altering who can participate and what relations can take shape in conditions of collapse. Working across installation, performance, video, civic practice, and critical writing, they treat space as a tool of governance: it sorts bodies, formats perception, and determines whose futures — human and nonhuman — are thinkable. Through participatory interventions, their projects construct infrastructure — architectures, protocols, furniture — for lives and relations that existing orders cannot hold: illegible and multispecies forms of flourishing, refusal, and assembly.
Drawing on histories of institutional critique, experimental architecture, and alternative theater, Cheung's work often operates 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 various 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 climate-shifted 2045. Their writing includes essays in cultural criticism, most recently "Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot" on libidinal economies, the aesthetics of softness, and the politics of collective exhaustion under platform capitalism.
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.
