Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and educator working across installation, performance, architecture, video, VR, and more. Drawing on histories of institutional critique, experimental architecture, and alternative theater, their work attends to the politics of spatial and epistemic systems. It traces, in particular, the operations of the built environment — how it governs bodies and publics, encodes ideological norms, and materializes claims to sovereignty and difference across people, states, and species.
In response, Cheung’s practice constructs alternative infrastructures — material, affective, and procedural — that unsettle dominant logics of use, access, and control, and ask what else might be possible within or beyond those terms. Their work is grounded in a commitment to expanding the conditions under which publics — human and nonhuman, emergent and illegible — can assemble, contest, and endure. Mobilizing strategies of participation, parafiction, and site-specificity, it stages speculative commons and partial collectivities across scales of the built and the felt — seeking not solutions, but sites of mutual unmaking and cohabitation.
Cheung will join the University of Florida in Fall 2025 as Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media in the School of Art + Art History. Previously, they taught at the University of Virginia, where they served as Head of Sculpture from 2022 to 2024, as well as at Colorado College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 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 Monira Foundation, the New York State Museum, and the Violet Crown. They collaborate regularly across disciplines and currently work under several parafictional and collective aliases — as the counter-architectural firm The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures; as part of the artist collective nonhumanities, with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick; and as various performed personae in public spaces.
You can find Cheung’s CV here, and you can reach them at conrad.ck.cheung@gmail.com.