The Institute of Contemporary Art presents Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses

Perceptions are challenged from the start. Anthropocene Landscapes 1 and 2 (both 2006) launch viewers to 6,000 and 30,000 feet, to see what seem to be airplane views of a city and countryside. But step closer, and see the colorful lands for what they are: grand assemblages of circuit boards. Whether you interpret the vision as dirt roads and skyscrapers, or copper wire and transformers, humans’ effect on the environment is undeniable.

An autobiography in art

It’s surprising that this is Cheng’s first major museum survey. Essentially, it’s his life story told in art, aided by an extremely detailed exhibition handout. Cheng began with photography, cutting and recombining black and white images to craft new worlds. “In photography you can extract objects … and leave the space,” he explained to exhibit curator Alex Klein. (Klein, head curator at The Contemporary Austin, initiated the exhibition while senior curator at ICA. The institutions partnered on Nature Never Loses, which premiered in Austin.)

The photographic creations reflect Cheng’s California roots and affection for cars and the open road. In Hudson (1966), a vintage auto cruises into the horizon, but sunlight on the trunk signals its placement, rather than presence, on the road. In Traveling Show (1980), we’re in the front seat, looking through the windshield at a collage of places we might go. Anti-Missile-Missile War (1976), an abstract commentary on car culture, juxtaposes horizontal slices of animals grazing peacefully, headlights that are way too close, and blurred highway, speeding by.

As one of five sons born to Chinese immigrant parents, Cheng is sensitive to exclusion and racism. The collage Bob (1970), made during the era of the Vietnam draft, expresses Cheng’s concern that this brother, or any of the Cheng boys, should they go to war, would be ostracized and possibly mistaken for the enemy.

Just far-fetched enough

In 1967, Cheng began working under the alias John Doe Co. as a way to sidestep latent racism and to satirize corporate culture. Humor permeates the artist’s practice, especially in John Doe’s “products”, which include the Rock Communication Indicator (1983), two bocce ball-sized rocks, an electronic meter, and red and black probes, encased in an oh-so-serious wood briefcase. Inside, the product statement explains that since the discovery that plants communicate, “The Research and Development Department of the John Doe Company devised this simulated instrument for testing the concept that rocks also have the ability to communicate with themselves.” Considering that 1983 wasn’t long after the actual, and wildly successful, marketing of “pet rocks”, this didn’t sound too far-fetched. Which is Cheng’s secret: He’s just far-fetched enough.

Nearby are Alternative TVs (1979-2016), part of the 1980 intervention, Alternative Television: A Public Arts Project by John Doe Co., in which Cheng interrupted regularly scheduled programming to replace tubes and circuits with rocks, plants, and fishtank-quality lighting. Indeed, the hollowed-out TVs originally functioned as fishtanks and, though now dry and LED- lit, the atmosphere remains aquatic. Recall that when cable television, and then the Internet, were new, the novelty of watching fish glide serenely across screens soothed many agitated technophobes.

Manufacturing nature, retooling art

Cheng’s early training in industrial design and penchant for experimentation are evident in the Nature Machines and Art Tools, which would not look out of place in a manufacturing or scientific setting. The artist designs, assembles, and continues to tweak works, which explains creation dates that span decades. The point of the Nature Machines, Cheng has written, is to “model nature, its processes and effects for a future environment that may completely be made by humans.”

Two bright-yellow Erosion Machines (1969-2020) look like hybrids: half washing machine, half oven. Each small unit has two windows: On the right, water churns over a plaster rock. On the left, replacement rocks sit on racks. The machines symbolize the inevitable decomposition of everything—nature, the built environment, and ourselves. Cheng made five Erosion Machines to represent himself and his brothers.

Emotional Tools (1966-2024) stand like stick soldiers in a box frame. Some are brush-tipped, some have teeth, several look like iced-tea spoons, and still others like dental pics. Their emotional application, whether therapeutic or diagnostic, isn’t clear.

In the middle of the first-floor gallery is the Avocado Laboratory (1998-2024), a greenhouse lined with botanically organized trays of dissected skins and carved pits, Cheng’s investigation into the effects of the elements on one of his favorite foods. The destructive power of time is a continuing theme. As exhibition notes explain, “For Cheng, the eventual deterioration … the ephemerality of artworks made from organic or natural materials, become metaphors for the precarity of a climate and landscape irrevocably changed by humans.”

In the streets and on the beach

Living and traveling in Japan, Indonesia, and India during the 1970s, Cheng noticed how cultures valued individual objects, and thought about the art world’s tendency to elevate art over craft. He thought about the way in which museums preserve, but also sequester art, and soon he shifted his practice toward public installation, much of it centered in southern California, near his Santa Monica base. This phase is principally represented by videos and archival materials, with one exception: the bespoke sand drawing Human Landscapes—Imaginary Landscape 1 (2025), which dominates a corner of ICA’s second floor.

The Natural Museum of Modern Art (1978), staged on Santa Monica Pier, at once challenged the arbitrariness of museum collections and acknowledged the fragility of nature. The Natural Museum was an art automat: a passerby entered, chose what to see, inserted a coin, and moved along to view the selection. Those who wished to comment could drop a note in a slot by the exit.

Another project created a relief map of Los Angeles on the beach, using a steel and concrete roller imprinted with a reverse mold of the city. Towed by a tractor, Santa Monica Art Tool (1983-1988) created Walk on L.A., a miniature cityscape for beachgoers to view, trample and, Cheng hoped, recognize as an implied warning.

“Cheng’s work emerged when artists were playing with the idea of consumer culture, technology, and mass production while earnestly addressing the environmental impacts of such activities,” said Denise Ryner, ICA’s receiving curator. “His emphasis on participatory and public work … from the 1960s on stands out as prescient.” Never more so than in this moment of devastation across the very landscape in which Cheng has practiced for six decades.