Conrad Cheung

Conrad Cheung is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media at the University of Florida, where they are also Affiliate Faculty in Sustainability Studies. They were previously Head of Sculpture at the University of Virginia. Their work enters institutions and ecologies and redesigns them from within, to widen what publics, human and nonhuman, can take part in the commons, and on what terms. What results are counter-systems, built with civic agencies, designers, scientists, and local communities as infrastructure for collective improvisation, multispecies cohabitation, and other forms of participation that existing orders cannot otherwise accommodate.

Ongoing projects include One Million Counterextinctions (2025 – 2027), a multi-year civic collaboration with Alachua County government that equips non-expert publics to design multispecies infrastructure for a climate-shifted 2045, and a river full of all my lost loved ones (2026), a public commission for the Hippodrome in downtown Gainesville that transforms the theater’s six neoclassical columns into 26-foot scenes built from over 600 drawings by children in its programs, printed partly in thermochromic ink that disappears in the day’s heat and returns as the air cools, with an opening performance developed with composer Colin Self. Cheung’s work often operates through collaborative platforms, including the Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures (III) and the art collective nonhumanities.

Their first book, Making Unseizable, on the design of collective forms that can resist institutional capture under hostile governance, is forthcoming from MIT Press. Their writing has also been published by Asia Art Archive (“Libidinal Loop, Rotten Image: A Theory of Brainrot,” 2025), where they are co-editor, with Paul Fermin, of a forthcoming series, and further essays are forthcoming in Social Text and in Broadcast at Pioneer Works.