Jeffrey Kastner
A lifetime’s work of exploring the tension between natural processes and human technologies, on view at ICA Philadelphia.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, installation view. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensch.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, curated by Alex Klein with Rachel Eboh for the Contemporary Austin, organized by Denise Ryner for the ICA Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 118 South Thirty-Sixth Street, Philadelphia, through April 6, 2025
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In Nature Never Loses, the first comprehensive survey of the long career of Carl Cheng (currently on view at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art), the most recent work turns out to be the product of a technology the artist innovated some fifty years ago. In the 1970s, Cheng developed what he called a “sand rake art tool,” one of the first of many ingenious homespun apparatuses he would produce across the decades for creating artifacts and effects. The original modest device, developed in his Los Angeles studio, scored simple lines in sand; in Philadelphia, Human Landscapes—Imaginary Landscape 1 (2025) is an installation occupying an entire room, in which a low mesa of white powder has been intricately shaped by that prototype’s considerably more sophisticated descendent. Now a complex hybrid mechanism controlled remotely by Cheng, the updated machine—a low-slung horizontal metal carriage parked, post-operation, against the gallery’s back wall like a life-size Erector Set model—allows him to deploy puffs of air, drops of water, and various inscriptive instruments to create troughs and tumuli in the fine substrate. The result is a mandala-like composition suggesting a mash-up of Japanese karesansui, Nazcan geoglyphs, and the infotech contours of a circuit board. And, although it took many days of painstaking work to create, in keeping with the artist’s extensive engagement with issues of ephemerality, the delicate construction will simply be swept back into disaggregated granularity when the exhibition is packed up for shipping to the next stop on its itinerary.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, installation view. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensch. Pictured: Human Landscapes—Imaginary Landscape 1, 2025.
The sand landscape neatly condenses a range of the eighty-three-year-old’s remarkably consistent, often prescient artistic interests: nature and culture; modernity and deep time; the inevitability of change; a fascination with systems and procedures, and the ways in which human and nonhuman examples of each do, and do not, map onto each other. Born in San Francisco, Cheng grew up in Southern California and enrolled at UCLA intending to study painting. After quickly becoming disenchanted with the program and recognizing an awakening affinity for STEM-style materials and methodologies, Cheng switched his major to industrial design. A year abroad at the Folkwang Art School in Essen, Germany, brought him into contact with the disciplinary unities and technological progressivism that postwar German art pedagogy had inherited from the Bauhaus. He returned to UCLA and completed an MFA in 1967 in the photography department that had recently been inaugurated by the influential teacher Robert Heinecken; the earliest pieces in Nature Never Loses are a series of three-dimensional molded plastic paraphotographic objects made between 1966 and 1968 that earned Cheng his first art-world recognition when some were included in the 1970 MoMA exhibition Photography into Sculpture.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, installation view. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensch. Pictured, far right foreground, on table: Sculpture for Stereo Viewers, 1968. Kodalith film, vacuum-formed plastic, wood, and Plexiglas. Back center right, on table: Nowhere Road, 1967. Kodalith film, vacuum-formed plastic, dye, and Plexiglas.
As the photographic aspect of his practice receded in favor of the sculptural, Cheng increasingly focused his attention on experiments meant to put into productive tension natural processes—growth, decay, the effects of age and weathering—and broadly correlative human technologies. These interests led to loose associations with the two foundational techno-artistic enterprises of the day: the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group, involving artists and Bell Labs engineers, on the East Coast, and LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman’s Art & Technology initiative on the West Coast. Yet Cheng’s skepticism toward corporatized institutions (whatever their putative goals) meant that he kept both at arm’s length. Instead of joining up, he struck out defiantly on his own. Beginning in 1967, Cheng would incorporate his studio practice as John Doe Co., a practical decision that would allow him to more easily deduct the cost of the industrial materials he was now regularly employing. But it was also a sardonic critique of rampant commodification both outside and inside the art world, and a Duchampian act of pseudonymous personal reinvention designed to counteract the preconceptions Cheng felt weighing on his work as a result of his Asian American identity. This gesture, with its manifold purposes, encapsulates the wryly ramifying intelligence characteristic of his entire oeuvre.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, installation view. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensch. Pictured: Erosion Machine No. 1, 1969–2020 (detail). Plexiglas, metal racks and fittings, plastic, water pump, LED lights, black light, pebbles, “human rocks” (composite of organic and inorganic materials), and wood base.
His company’s “products,” as Cheng called them, represent the bulk of the work on display. Early pieces like his Erosion Machines (1969–2020) plainly set the tone for what would come after. Fluorescently colored boxes reminiscent of microwaves, the contraptions are designed to direct a constant stream of water onto “human rocks” (composite forms created by Cheng out of plaster and found organic and inorganic material) until they begin to deteriorate, staging an elemental hydro-geological effect via a mode of mechanical production to create a literal object lesson in the inescapability of degeneration. Meanwhile, in his Alternative TV series (1979–2016), he detourned those echt conveyances of mass media by turning them into aquariums, and then later, as seen here, terrariums, offering arrangements of plastic plants and rocks found in nature for contemplation in place of sitcoms and deodorant commercials.
Carl Cheng, Alternative TV #3, 1974–2016 (not on view at ICA). Plastic chassis, acrylic water tank, air pump, LED lighting and controller, electrical cord, aquarium hardware, conglomerated rocks, and plastic plants. Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery.
The anti-TVs were originally displayed in the windows of eight Berkeley bookstores as part of one of many public art interventions Cheng would initiate over the years—his training as a designer, familiarity with industrial tools and methods, and desire to reach wider, nonspecialized audiences made him a successful candidate for public commissions from institutions and Percent-for-Art funding pools, and the show presents a number of them. Indeed, the greatest amount of gallery real estate devoted to a single project is a wall featuring documentation of arguably his best-known such initiative, Santa Monica Art Tool (Walk on L.A.) (1983–88), a large concrete roller to which Cheng affixed a negative relief he’d made depicting an aerial view of Los Angeles. Towed behind a tractor on the beach, it left an imprint of the urban landscape that he then invited viewers to walk on—offering the city for destruction beneath the feet of the spectators, figured as Godzilla-like marauders symbolizing humanity’s ineluctable depredation of the world around them.
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, installation view. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensch. Pictured: Santa Monica Art Tool (Walk on L.A.), 1983–88.
Cheng’s proclivity for drolly earnest tinkering occasionally resulted in pieces that feel like slightly aimless science-fair projects. Take his Organic Visualizer/Assembler (1976–2016), for example, a large interactive display unit, poised somewhere between a deli case and a piece of space junk, where viewers use pedals to illuminate unidentifiable “specimens” made, per the exhibition brochure, from “manipulated organic material,” like a send-up of a natural history museum’s gemological hall. But the inspirations for his endeavors more often tend toward ideas with real heft. Cheng is frequently credited as a kind of artistic canary in a coal mine for foregrounding, avant la lettre, the central fact of our Anthropocene condition—that where humans were once simply shaped by nature, they now are the primary shapers of it, and almost inevitably for ill. Yet his work actually offers little in the way of specific environmentalist tonics; instead, its achievement lies more in its persistently, creatively speculative materialism, its deep dive into the stuff, and the techne, of both the human and extra-human world.
Jeffrey Kastner is a New York–based writer and critic, the senior editor of Cabinet magazine, and a contributing editor of Places Journal. His books include the edited volumes Land and Environmental Art (Phaidon) and Nature (MIT/Whitechapel), and he is coauthor, with Claire Lehmann, of Artists Who Make Books (Phaidon). Formerly a regular contributor to Artforum, his writing has appeared in publications including the Economist, frieze, and the New York Times, and in books and exhibition catalogs on artists such as David Altmejd, Ragnar Kjartansson, Robert Ryman, and Sarah Sze.