Ian Cheng

Ian Cheng is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; and group presentations at Whitney Museum of American Art; New York; Hirshhorn Museum; Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; 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.”