Our Questions of Practice series has often focused on the query: “Who gets to be a contemporary artist? When? And why?” Prompted by several projects the Center has supported that have heightened recognition for late-career artists, we’ve spoken with painters Peter Saul and Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017), choreographer Anna Halprin (1920-2021), and reconsidered the work of photographers Pati Hill (1921-2014) and Barbara Kasten within this context, in an effort to further interrogate the meaning of contemporaneity. 

As Carl Cheng has seen his first major museum survey show at the age of 82, we approached the artist to ask how he thinks about his six-decade career today.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania from January 18–April 6, 2025. The exhibition showcases Cheng’s innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with environmental change, the role of technology in society, and personal identity—concerns as current as when Cheng began his career.

First developing his practice in Southern California in the 1960s, Cheng has contended with a contemporary landscape shaped by a growing interest in interdisciplinarity, technological advances, Vietnam War-era unrest, discrimination against Asian Americans, and an increasing awareness of humans’ impact on the environment. His often engagingly playful and irreverent sculptures, photography, “nature machines,” and “art tools” make use of a variety of materials, informed by his study of both art and industrial design, as well as his own “curiosity of natural phenomena.” Our conversation with Cheng follows.

How do you see your work in relationship to what might be called “the contemporary?”

The word contemporary just means "of our time" to me. Whatever I am doing at this time pertains to how I feel now.

What motivates your artistic practice?

I guess the simplest answer to motivation in my case is curiosity of natural phenomena. As I learned more of the laws of nature, that knowledge made me understand broader concepts of nature. In school, I studied Geology, Physics, and Zoology, not because I wanted to be an engineer or geologist, but because I was interested in natural phenomena. I majored in industrial design as an art student at UCLA so I was familiar with tools.

Your work has been heralded for its ecological considerations, in some cases predating the public consciousness about climate change by decades. How has your own thinking about earlier works evolved as this topic has become more widely considered by our society? 

I don't have the arrogance to say it was my idea. Growing up in the 1960s, every thinking person was conscious of the pollution, waste and overpopulation of the planet. Unfortunately, since then, nothing has changed, and it has gotten much worse!

A recent piece in Art in America suggested that your work has a “DIY ethos” and a “refreshing indifference to careerism.” Do you agree? How have you thought about your career and artistic recognition over your six decades as a working artist?

I guess in my case my work was more or less self-made, (DIY). It had more to do with poverty and my curiosity in looking for answers behind an answer and understanding nature. In America, careerism for an artist means how can I make what I do into a product to sell. That usually means you have one idea, and you hone that idea into a product. My travels to other Asian cultures showed me that some artists were more like poets, who, when you talk to them, they have unique concepts, philosophies, and lifestyles and might not make anything.

How does improvisation play a role in your practice? In works that collaborate with nature, does releasing control over the outcome interest you?

Chance, improvisation, experiment, failure, and discovery are all parts of my daily practice. Sometimes I make tools just to see what it can do. 

Has your perspective on the ephemerality of some of your works evolved over the course of your career?

Yes. Nothing made by humans will last forever.

Is there anything else about you and your work you’d like readers to know that we haven’t asked here? 

After 80 years, I can say this:
Everything in the Universe is energy; energy expressed in form is nature.
Nature is everything; everything is nature.
From nature evolved humans; from humans evolved technology.
Whether used or misused, nature never loses; nature always wins.
Using technology, artists express their thoughts and feelings of nature.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is curated by Alex Klein, head curator and director of cultural affairs at The Contemporary Austin (and previously senior curator at the Philadelphia ICA), with assistance from Rachel Eboh, curatorial assistant at The Contemporary Austin, and organized for the Philadelphia ICA by Denise Ryner, Andrea B. Laporte curator. The exhibition was previously presented at The Contemporary Austin and will travel to Bonnefanten Museum (Netherlands), Museum Tinguely (Switzerland), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles between 2025 and 2027. An accompanying exhibition catalogue is forthcoming in 2025.