Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses
By Chenoa Baker for The Brooklyn Rail
March 6, 2025
“Everything can be turned into an artifact, a relic. There’s no waste. It all finds a place.”
—Carl Cheng, exhibition vinyl (coincidentally the same typeface as the font in Speculative Everything by Dunne and Raby, giving it a Futuristic resonance)
Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses, connoting that the natural world subsumes the artificial one, is divided into six parts: “Photography as a Tool”; “Natural Processes and Nature Machines”; “Travel and Specimens”; “John Doe Co.” (the name he gave his studio after incorporating); “Art Tools”; and “Public Art Projects and Installations.” While this survey showcases artwork made in California since the 1960s—with the historical context of the Space Race, Maoism, the Vietnam War, and the development of Silicon Valley—its existence in other locales in the 2020s echoes a different timbre. Cheng (b. 1942 in San Francisco and currently living and working in Santa Monica) was influenced by the post-Bauhaus industrial design movement that saw design as interdisciplinary; therefore, his genre-defying work, anchored in Southern California, combines technology with industrial materials to work in hybrid media like molded plastic and photographic sculptural film, all present in the ICA Philadelphia’s exhibition.
An interstitial space between the first and second-floor galleries had a monograph that magnetized me: Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada (2015). Normally, this would be ignored, but it pulled me in like the choreography of curation. Purifoy used similar materials to Cheng, but they existed as sculptural reminders of the Watts Riots in which they were sourced. While Cheng has worked in Southern California since the sixties, he transformed industrial materials’ function into another purpose entirely.