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 practice 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, materializes claims to sovereignty and difference (across humans, nations, species), and archives the shifting imperatives of ideology and capital.
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 and affective infrastructures 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 grounded in strategies of participation, parafiction, and site-specificity, with ethical commitments to enactment at the scales of architecture and body.
Cheung is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and affiliate faculty in the Environmental Thought and Practice program at the University of Virginia. In Fall 2025, they will join the University of Florida as Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media in the School of Art + Art History. They hold an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they were 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.