Carl Cheng
Nature Never Loses

Carl Cheng, Documentation of «Santa Monica Art Tool» and its installation «Walk on LA», Santa Monica State Beach, 1988. Courtesy the artist.

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses

3 Dec 2025 – 10 May 2026

 

Nature Never Loses surveys six decades of the prescient, genre-defying work of artist Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco; lives and works in Santa Monica). Having studied both fine art and industrial design, Cheng first developed his art practice in Southern California in the 1960s, amid political unrest, an interdisciplinary art scene, a booming post-war aerospace industry, and rapid development of the landscape. His ever-evolving body of work, incorporating a variety of materials and media, engages with environmental change, the relevance of art institutions to their publics, and the role of technology in society—topics with urgent contemporary relevance. Originally recognized for his photographic sculptures, his inventive lexicon includes Art Tools employed in the production of ephemeral artworks, Nature Machines that anticipate an artificial world shaped by humans, and extra-institutional interventions intended to reach broad audiences.

In 1966, Cheng incorporated his studio under the name John Doe Co. This move, made originally for practical reasons, poked fun at the commodification of art and the brand of the artist, while also serving as a simultaneous critique of corporate culture and the Vietnam War-era discrimination he experienced as an Asian American. In the guise of John Doe Co., he has created sculptural 'products' that reflect his conception of technology as an artistic tool and his skepticism of neoliberal notions of progress that have shaped both the art market and the tech industry.

 

The generosity, irreverence, and playfulness that infuse Cheng’s work are of a piece with his embrace of organic materials and processes and his commitment to making art in public spaces. Throughout, Cheng has consistently probed questions of natural agency and the extractive impact of humans on their environment, summed up in his frequent declarations, at once humorous, foreboding, and hopeful that 'nature never loses', 'nature always wins', and 'nature is everything.'

Carl Cheng, Nowhere Road, 1967, Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody; Foto: Robert Wedemeyer

1. Photography as a Tool

For Carl Cheng, photography is both a framing device and an artistic tool that he uses to extract images from their contexts. He attributes this approach to his studies at the Folkwang Hochschule, Essen, Germany (1964–5) and UCLA (BA 1959–63 and MA 1965–7), where he received an interdisciplinary, Bauhaus-influenced education that wedded art and industry. At UCLA, Cheng studied with Robert Heinecken, who founded the photography program and cultivated an open-ended and experimental approach. This ethos, in conjunction with Cheng’s background in industrial design—he also briefly worked as a model maker in the office of designers Charles and Ray Eames—grounds early series such as his molded plastic photographs and continues to inform his expanded engagement with lens-based media.

Carl Cheng originally gained recognition for his threedimensional molded plastic photo objects through his participation in the 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture, curated by Peter Bunnell, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nowhere Road was one of three of Cheng’s photo objects included in the show (also included were Sculpture for Stereo Viewers, 1967, and U.N. of C., 1967). The classic Americana image of the car on an open road is a frequent symbol in Cheng’s early work, relating to his experience growing up in California with a VW camper van, a newly paved freeway system, and abundant motorway access to the desert. In Nowhere Road, with its nuclear explosion looming in the distance, Cheng signals a shift in this optimistic relationship to the road and industry.

Carl Cheng, Erosion Machine No. 4, 1969-2020, Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Foto: Jeff McLane

2. Natural Processes and Nature Machines

Cheng’s artistic concerns in the 1960s seem to anticipate the expanding awareness of environmental issues and later, in the 2000s, the concept of the Anthropocene, a term used to describe the current geologic era shaped by human impact on the atmosphere and landscape. Early in his practice Cheng began to describe human-made products that had lost their function (for example, a broken toaster) as 'human rocks', observing that, to the extent that they are a composite of minerals and chemicals, they are also a part of nature. Alongside experiments that subjected sculptural forms produced in his studio to environmental conditions such as weathering and erosion, he also created artworks out of organic materials like lizard skins and cacti, and pursued sometimes decades-long durational processes of growth and decay as artistic methodologies. Cheng further explored this way of making in sculptures he dubbed Nature Machines, new products he created to reproduce natural phenomena and overturn conventional notions of authorship and artistic agency.

The five Erosion Machines, which symbolically refer to Cheng and his brothers, consolidate many of his preoccupations with the intersections of technology, nature, and artistic process. Described by the artist as Nature Machines, Cheng, who constructed these fluorescent-hued sculptural products from commercial materials, designed them to perform experiments with the various effects of erosion, underscoring that all matter will eventually break down, no matter how wellcrafted or sophisticated. When turned on, the machines were engineered to continuously spray water on Cheng’s “human rocks”—sedimented plaster forms embedded with residual material such as pieces of everyday technological products or items from his studio rooftop’s Weathering Station. Cheng describes each machine as having adjustable eroding functions such as slicing, washing, and compound-drilling, although he has continually modified their functionality over time. Replacement “rocks” are displayed on a shelf next to the tank allowing the user to create new sculptural forms, conduct their own erosion experiments, or simply let the objects degrade and disappear.

«My work acknowledges erosion, obsolescence, weathering, and decay. It's part of the whole process that nothing is permanent.»

Carl Cheng, Emotional Tools, 1966–2024, Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Foto: Jeff McLane

3. Travel and Specimens

Cheng’s travels in the early 1970s with his partner, graphic designer Felice Mataré, deeply influenced his perspective as an artist. Living and travelling in Japan, Indonesia, India and other Asian countries changed his outlook on the value placed on discrete objects, Western modes of making art, authorship, and audiences. Embarking on a process of unlearning, Cheng began to question hierarchies among art, craft, and commerce as well as the insularity of art museums. This comprehensive reappraisal eventually fostered his interest in making public art. His itinerant lifestyle also led him to produce smaller scale artworks that he could ship back to himself in Los Angeles, where he later incorporated them into larger projects. These include organic 'specimens' featured in artworks such as the Art Medicine Kit and elusive, small sculptures referred to as Emotional Tools.

«Everything can be turned into an artifact, a relic. There’s no waste. It all finds a place.»

Carl Cheng, Early Warning System,1967-2024, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; Foto: Jeff McLane

4. John Doe Co.

In 1966, Cheng began working under the name John Doe Co, which he registered as an LLC in 1970 not only for tax purposes, but also as a way to gain easier access to industrial materials. Eventually it also served as a commentary on the art market’s commodification of the signature style of the artist, and as a response to Vietnam War-era social unrest and the marginalization he faced as an Asian American artist. Heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp and his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, Cheng was intrigued by anonymity and the imaginative potential it offered. As John Doe Co., Cheng creates sculptural products for a not-so-distant future of environmental collapse: Nature Machines that reproduce the effects of the weather; kits and optical devices that incorporate organic materials for analysis and imaginative use; and alternative entertainment devices that respond to the dominance of mass media.

Early Warning System is a plastic tower-like structure that houses a radio that continuously plays the local maritime weather wherever it is displayed and projectors fabricated by Cheng showing abstracted images of human encroachments on the environment, such as oil spills and garbage dumps. Cheng envisioned installing it on a hilltop as a beacon to draw attention to the worsening conditions of pollution and to alert us to natural disasters. Since its creation in 1967, Cheng placed stalks of wheat in a recently constructed wooden base and updated some of the automatic features and slide imagery for a contemporary exhibition context.

An early work that synthesizes his training in photography and industrial design, Early Warning System is one of Cheng’s first mechanized sculptures. Cheng views the technologies he invents as works in progress. As he is an adept fabricator, here, as with the majority of his artworks and installations, he assembles, and subsequently modifies, all of the elements himself. When it was displayed in 1970 at the Esther Robles Gallery in Los Angeles, a product card describing its function accompanied Cheng’s new device, as though marketing it for general distribution.

Carl Cheng, Art Tool Paint Experiments (Paint Dipper in Display Box), 1972, Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Foto: Ruben Diaz

5. Art Tools

Art Tools, alternative instruments for making art, are one of the key continuing product lines of John Doe Co. Cheng uses these “tools,” which are durable mechanical devices, to create ephemeral compositions such as drips of wax or paint and drawings made with sand. Cheng was motivated to invent these new ways to make his work in response to the traditional privileging of tools such as chisel and brush over contemporary technological alternatives. While Cheng’s earliest Art Tools were simple and small in scale, these rudimentary prototypes eventually evolved into sophisticated, motorized apparatuses and large, room-sized installations.

Although Cheng has incorporated new technology into each succeeding model of these products, he prefers to avoid more automated and computerized systems, which might undermine his ability to operate and service each machine himself. The Art Tools thus demonstrate Cheng’s understanding of technology as both a set of limitations and a space of creativity and his conviction that we need to develop new formal tools and technologies for futures that have yet to be imagined.

Cheng made some of his earliest investigative Art Tools in the UC Irvine wood shop where he worked as the lab technician after returning from his travels throughout Asia from 1970 to 1972. These were simple wooden constructions that applied paint in different ways, such as dragging, dipping, and pouring. The dried paint, accumulating with each use, transformed the tools into sculptural objects. The organic lacquer used in these earliest Art Tools is the same kind of material used to paint automobiles and that was employed by artists often associated with 'California Finish Fetish', such as Billy Al Bengston. Subsequently, Cheng produced a custom, John Doe Co. branded box that is simultaneously a mode of transport, storage, and display for his sculptural experiments. He sees these works as a humorous take on his relationship to painting, often commenting that his fixation on application, process, and material has prevented him from ever developing a focused painting practice.

Carl Cheng, Human Landscapes, 2022, Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Foto: Brica Wilcox, courtesy of REDCAT, Los Angeles

6. Public Art Projects and Installations

Following his travels throughout Asia in the 1970s, Cheng shifted his focus from exhibiting stand-alone objects within conventional art galleries to creating large-scale, kinetic installations and competing for Percent-for-Art public art commissions. In the 1960s, many cities across the US adopted a Percent-for-Art program where one percent of every development project’s budget was allocated towards public art projects, in effect creating a new need for and emphasis on art in public spaces across the country. In 1979, soon after Cheng staged his self-initiated Natural Museum of Modern Art, he was awarded his first official public art commission for Seattle Underwater.

Cheng’s background in industrial design provided the skills he needed to create compelling and practical proposals, and his experimental approach to artmaking enhanced his ability to engage with a variety of environmental factors and materials. Cheng views his public art projects as opportunities to work on a larger scale and reach a wider audience. He also sees them as an expanded investigation into what he terms 'human erosion'. For Cheng, the eventual deterioration of many of his public projects due to vandalism or lack of maintenance, as well as the ephemerality of artworks made from organic or natural materials, become metaphors for the precarity of a climate and landscape irrevocably changed by humans and their built environment.

 

In his Pico Boulevard studio, Cheng developed the first prototype of a Sand Rake Art Tool, which, in its earliest iteration, scored lines of sand in crude linear patterns. In 1979, he created another prototype on the second floor of his Santa Monica Pier studio above the Natural Museum of Modern Art. With this new device Cheng operated an expanded XY plotter retrofitted with droppers, scrapers, brushes, and drawing tools made from his collected organic specimens to carve into, shape, and smooth over the surface of a bed of sand. The resulting installation was titled Drawing at the Beach. Over the years, Cheng has continued to refine this Art Tool, integrating parts of the original sand rake art tools into newer incarnations that have created increasingly sophisticated installations for venues such as: Artec ‘93, in Nagoya, Japan in 1993; the Sculpture Center in New York in 2000; and REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2022, the latter of which was co-restored by the organizers of this exhibition in preparation for its current presentation.

Fundamentally, the rakes are Art Tools to be used to create increasingly complex sand drawings. To make the installation Cheng works alone at the site over the course of up to two weeks. Using a controller, he instructs his tool to drag different patterns, drop sand, blow air, and drip water to produce a layered intuitive drawing that is erased at the conclusion of the exhibition. A behind-the-scenes look at Cheng’s process can be seen in the related video on view in this gallery. The Sand Rake Art Tool raises methodological questions about the status of the artwork (for example, should the tool also be considered an artwork unto itself?) as well as a profound conundrum around preservation given the sand drawings’ ephemeral nature and dependence on the artist himself.

Installation of Human Landscapes and Art Tool: Rake 1002, Videostill, 2022 at REDCAT, Los Angeles

 

Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses is curated by Alex Klein, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Contemporary Austin, with assistance from Rachel Eboh, Curatorial Assistant, The Contemporary Austin, and Andres Pardey, vice-director and curator, Museum Tinguely.


A comprehensive publication will be released by JRP | Editions, documenting the oeuvre of Carl Cheng. With contributions by Alex Klein, Rachel Eboh, Joel Ferree, Celien Govaerts, Andres Pardey, Amanda Sroka, and Gloria Sutton.


The exhibition is organized by The Contemporary Austin in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Bonnefanten, Maastricht; Museum Tinguely, Basel; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Artist Talk Carl Cheng at Museum Tinguely, with the curators Alex Klein and Andres Pardey