Carl Cheng
By Jeffrey Kastner for 4Columns
April 4, 2025
A lifetime’s work of exploring the tension between natural processes and human technologies, on view at ICA Philadelphia.
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.