Penn's Institute of Contemporary Art will be displaying the work of Carl Cheng until April 6.
Credit: Courteney RossPenn’s Institute of Contemporary Art is displaying the work of Carl Cheng in a new exhibition titled “Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses."
The exhibit, which will run through April 6, features over six decades of Cheng’s work. Partly funded by a grant provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage in Philadelphia, the exhibit also features numerous works from Cheng’s personal studio, many of which are being shown for the first time.
Cheng, who is based in California, has spent over 60 years working as an artist and creating works centered around “critical topics such as identity, technology, and ecology.” He holds an undergraduate degree in industrial design and art and a master’s degree in fine arts, both from the University of California at Los Angeles.
During a fellowship at the Folkwang School of Art in Germany, Cheng experienced the intersection of art, design, dance, theater, and music, leading him to work with a diverse set of materials, including plastic, wood, metal, plants, and sand.
Moreover, Cheng has never had studio assistants and produced the works displayed at the gallery by himself.
The exhibit was curated by Alex Klein, who served as a senior curator at the ICA until 2022. Klein started to work on the exhibit with Cheng five years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We worked really closely for Carl to tell his own story — going through his archives, creating a comprehensive approach of how to dive into his work,” Klein said during the opening tour.
One of Cheng's most famous works, titled “Santa Monica Art Tool,” is a large-scale sand project involving a cement roller pressing shapes into the sand present on the public beach area between Santa Monica and Malibu. A video wall in the ICA exhibition features the work.
“It elicited this kind of wondrous, kind of childlike reaction when you get to stomp on a city,” Klein said to Penn Today. “You can also think about the fragility of the built environment and precarity of the human experience. It can all just be washed away.”
The ICA has often hosted several events and exhibitions open to Penn students and other students in the Philadelphia area, including its After Dark event, which is presented by the ICA Student Board and gives students the chance to interact with the art at the institute.
“I don’t have a drawing for it. I just get started, and then it leads me to the next thing. Whatever I’m doing, it just kind of naturally evolves into something,” Cheng said to Penn Today. “To me, you’ve got to just keep open and just intuitively do it. It’s like a performance, even though it is sculpture.”
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