Carl Cheng USA, 1942

Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco, CA) began his studies in art and design at the University of California (Los Angeles, CA) in 1958. There he worked with professors like Don Chipperfield, John Neuhart, Henry Dreyfus and Robert Heinecken, each of whom emphasized material exploration, problem-solving and cross-pollination. In 1964 Cheng received a fellowship to study at the Folkwang School of Art (Essen, Germany), where he experienced a post-Bauhaus pedagogy that placed art and design together with dance, theater and music. Cheng's experience in Germany also gave him his first exposure to life outside Southern California, as well as a viewpoint on racial and cultural politics in the United States that has stayed with him his entire life.

Cheng has long questioned the role of individuals in a mass media society driven by corporate interests. His work takes a material and conceptual approach that pushes the boundaries of traditional object making, post-minimalism, systems art, environmental art, and social practice. For nearly six decades, he has produced pioneering works exploring, as Mark Johnstone has written, “technology and nature as levers, one applied to the other, in order to discover and reveal the beautiful wonders of each.” Cheng plays a unique role in the history of American contemporary art practice and the history of art in California.