For over six decades, Carl Cheng (b. 1942 in San Francisco, CA; lives and works in Santa Monica, CA) has worked across a variety of media to explore the tensions between nature, artmaking, identity, and technology. Supported by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the first major museum survey show of his work, Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania from January 18–April 6, 2025.
At UCLA, Cheng studied industrial and graphic design as an undergraduate and later became one of the first graduate students of the university's new photography department under the direction of photographer Robert Heinecken. His experience at UCLA as well as his graduate work at the Folkwang Essen, Germany, exposed Cheng to the interdisciplinary ethos of the Bauhaus-influenced education that wedded art and industry.
Cheng has exhibited his work in solo presentations at venues such as Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Capp Street Project, San Francisco; LIST Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Sculpture Center, New York City; and ASG Foundation Gallery, Nagoya, Japan. Starting in the late 1970s, he found a wider platform through public art (both official and self-initiated). In recent years, the methods and questions raised by Cheng’s practice have resonated with a younger generation resulting in his inclusion in group exhibitions such as: Potential Worlds 2: Eco-Fictions, Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zürich, Switzerland; 3D: Double Vision, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Specters of Disruption, de Young Museum, San Francisco; and Emerald City, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, as well as new scholarship.
Cheng's artworks can be found in the permanent collections of institutions including Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zürich, Switzerland; de Young Museum, San Francisco; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
