Conrad Cheung is an artist and educator whose work spans 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 of a living archive of how ideology and capital mutate and circulate globally.
In response, their practice proposes conditions of alternative spatiality and sociality as commons for flourishing and communing. In the face of our various crises, what material infrastructures and affective reorientations — of care, desire, normativity — might allow for the emergence of eclectic new publics and ways of living differently with others, especially socially illegible and nonhuman subjects? Cheung’s work is typically driven by strategies of participation, collaboration, site-specificity, and parafiction, and bears ethical commitments to enactment at the scales of architecture and body.
Cheung is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and affiliate faculty in the Environmental Thought and Practice program at the University of Virginia. Starting in Fall 2025, they will be Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida. 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 regularly collaborates across disciplines. They currently work under several aliases for parafictional and collaborative purposes — as the architectural firm The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures, with a rotating cast of collaborators; as the artist collective nonhumanities, with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick; and as the experimental home-goods company front door = back door, with Jess Robbins of Haptic; and as various performed personae in public spaces.
You can find Cheung’s CV here, and you can reach them at conradcheung@virginia.edu.