Carl Cheng
Carl Cheng's presentation in Made in L.A. 2025 surveys work from 1968 to the present. Often working under the pseudonym John Doe Co., Cheng has developed an idiosyncratic practice that merges sculpture, engineering, and environmental systems. His “nature machines” and pseudo-appliances—built from circuit boards, aquarium pumps, eroded rocks, and other found components—simulate natural processes, whirring, bubbling, and wearing down over time. Cheng first began to exhibit his work in the late 1960s, at a time when technological innovation flourished across Southern California. He was among the first artists to embrace the tools and aesthetics of aerospace, industrial design, and consumer electronics as a sculptural language. His Erosion Machines and other environmental devices enact change in real time, foregrounding impermanence and humanity’s modest place in the planet’s cycles. Many works position the viewer as both observer and caretaker, inviting reflection on how technology mediates our understanding of nature. By fusing industrial materials with organic processes, Cheng’s artworks are at once tools, sculptures, and thought experiments—poetic systems that challenge the presumed divide between the natural and the human-made and ask what kinds of “nature” our machines create for us.
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![A simple wooden box: on the left, two small mounds of sand sit in the box, with a stamp reading "EROSION SERIES," on the right, the box top with the words "JOHN DOE CO." burned into it]()
Carl Cheng, Erosion Series 2, 1975Compacted sediment, cardboard, wooden box. 6 × 13 × 11 in. (15.2 × 33 × 27.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest
Carl Cheng was born in 1942 in San Francisco. Through a genre-defying interdisciplinary practice, Cheng’s explores the relationship between nature and technology, consumer culture, and racial injustice. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2025); Bonnefanten, Maastricht, Netherlands (2025); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2025); The Contemporary Austin (2024); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2022); and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2022, 2020). Recent group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2025); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2024); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2024); Chez Max et Dorothea, Los Angeles (2024); Another Space, New York (2020); Migos Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich (2020); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2018); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2018). Cheng earned a BA and an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles (1963, 1967).