Crises in diverse art worlds have always provided opportunities to develop new aesthetic and collective modes and politics. Recently, the complicity of various art institutions and economies with war, genocide, and the digital technologies enhancing them has spurred an examination of the resources made available to artists, with one strategy being to treat them as a means as opposed to an end. Instead of remaining dependent on established markets and institutions for survival, these approaches frequently involve collaboration and alternative community formations. An example receiving a little extra attention in New York City right now is the collaborative CFGNY.
The acronym is most commonly designated as Concept Foreign Garments New York, but as indicated on tags attached to clothes they produce and sell, it can also stand for Cute Fucking Gay New York, Caramelize Fry Glaze New York, Capital Franchise Gains New York, and more than twenty more appellations. This linguistic polymorphous perversity is very much in the spirit of the group’s genre- and gender-fluid practice, encompassing fashion, performance, sculpture, photography, and installation—all rooted in collaboration. In keeping with CFGNY’s method, these descriptions are also creatively adaptable for various situations. Less site-specific, their work is site-responsive, aiming for dialogue along with object.
The exhibition at Amant presents three interconnected systems, or sets of relations, or—as the artists have it—“puddles into pond.” The entrance space is a showroom with a few racks of CFGNY fashions on display, including shirts, blouses, pants, skirts, and a thin dress with a pouch near the belly filled with small stuffed animals (the group also has clothes for sale in the Whitney Museum’s store as part of their participation in the current Whitney Biennial). Here, labor is foregrounded: both the clothes and accessories that CFGNY assembles, and ones made for them by tailors and garment workers in Vietnam and other locations. The second gallery features a collaboration with fourteen mostly Asian American artists and creatives who each took a ceramic disk of similar size and depth and modified it or filled it with ceramic objects, from Stewart Uoo’s three curled-up, color-splattered cats to Cole Lu’s cracked, miniature ancient city and Elliot Reed’s vibrant, swirling abstractions. Spanning the installation to create an indoor landscape with these small, round “ponds” is a bridge covered in shaggy, fake brown fur. The third room contains System (Five Times) (2026), an improvised technology consisting of five water clocks propelled by a suspended plastic tank. Each clock is unique, whether a hunched and headless mannequin wearing a sheer white shirt, a partial obelisk, or two transparent vinyl tote bags; and each keeps its own time. In both of these rooming-filling installations, the potentially reconfigurable and structurally flexible whole is the result of its distinctive parts. The mutability of water—whether real or imagined; and as object, liquid, and gas—partially unites them.
Despite their particular focus, the three galleries mix labor, collaboration, and technology. This sense of interrelation, and even interdependency, is central to CFGNY’s practice. Intersectional identities, or a politics of interrelation, mean that subject positions are always fluctuating, reflecting, and refracting. CFGNY like to describe themselves as “vaguely Asian,” which makes sense given the sundry geographical and cultural backgrounds of core members Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen (and recent member Kirsten Kilponen), as well as the varying lengths of time their families have lived in the United States. But it also makes sense because there is no definitive or even generalizable category called Asian American (or, for that matter, any ethnicity), and CFGNY is interested in the slipperiness of difference, not in order to occlude, but to create a greater web of connections and alliances. Similarly, CFGNY’s emphasis on queerness helps direct ways of making community away from a heteronormative formula not only embedded in capitalism but quite literally reproducing it. In this sense, queerness is inseparable from the possibilities of an alternative future and perhaps a less administered time.
The point is to remain open to opportunities, relationships, geographies, cultures, and even temporalities. This includes the materials CFGNY uses, most of which are readily sourced, including the tropes and objects of mass culture as represented by the group’s embrace of teddy bears, which share a ubiquity alongside the potential for becoming symbolically charged. As with questions of identity, CFGNY puts the art object and the exhibition into play, treating them as processes and not products. Similarly, if communities are defined as much by what they exclude as include, CFGNY seeks to keep them mobile and malleable. Yet this isn’t simply community as shifting coteries, but rather as networks of material and cultural sustenance in the face of real-world and art-world systems that are only further separating the haves and have-nots, while pushing more of the former into the economically and existentially perilous place of the latter.
