Ian Cheng

Ian Cheng (b. 1984 in Los Angeles) is an artist based in New York. He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Light Art Space, Berlin; The Shed, New York; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Serpentine Galleries, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and group presentations at Venice Biennale, Venice; Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Young Museum, San Francisco; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Okayama Art Summit, Okayama; 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. He is the creator of BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI-driven creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” Most recently, Cheng directed Life After BOB, a real-time anime exploring human-AI symbiosis. Cheng is the author of Emissary's Guide To Worlding, a book exploring the psychology and techniques of creating living autonomous worlds. Cheng is the founder of Opponent, a new company building animal-level AI agents for kids and families.