Ian Cheng

Ian Cheng (born Los Angeles, 1984) is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Shed, New York; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin. He has also been in group presentations at Venice Biennale; De Young Museum, San Francisco; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris and Sculpture Center, New York. Since 2012, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Most recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” In 2015, Cheng founded Metis Suns, a production company dedicated to worlding and worlding literacy.