CFGNY
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York) is a New York–based artist collective and fashion project founded in 2016 by Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew, later joined by Kirsten Kilponen and Ten Izu.[1][2] Working across clothing, video, sculpture, installation, and performance, the group examines racialization and diasporic identity through what they call the “vaguely Asian” lens—an elastic, relational framing that resists fixed notions of Asian or Asian-American authenticity.[3] CFGNY has presented runway-style performances and exhibitions at institutions including Japan Society (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Auto Italia (London), and the X Museum (Beijing), and has been profiled and reviewed by major art and fashion media.[4][5][6]
Nguyen (painting/sculpture) and Chew (film) met in New York’s downtown art scene and launched CFGNY in 2016 as an art–fashion platform to interrogate race, sexuality, and community within predominantly white cultural industries. Kilponen and Izu joined in 2020, expanding the collective’s multimedia practice.[7]
Work
CFGNY describes themselves as “artists who make clothes,” using garments as research objects alongside video, sculpture, and installation. The group’s key concept—“vaguely Asian”—names a shared experience of being perceived as Asian rather than a claim to essential identity; their work often stages mistranslation, bootleg logics, and porous authorship across global supply chains.[8] Critics have linked the practice to debates over identity and luxury, noting the way CFGNY deranges received ideas of “East/West” style and authenticity.[9] CFGNY’s process frequently involves collaboration with tailors in Ho Chi Minh City and casting intergenerational Asian creative communities for shows—foregrounding relationality over fashion’s typical hierarchies.
Notable works and motifs
- Video & institutional critique at Japan Society (2022–23). Reviewers highlighted a video shot with a borescope that moves from Japan Society archives (colonial travel language, elite menus) into the “innards” of CFGNY’s own sculptures—framing the institution’s constructed “Japaneseness” and dissolving the desire for authenticity
- “New Fashion II” (2018). Sheer mesh garments distended by stuffed animals, indebted to Sianne Ngai’s aesthetics and Comme des Garçons’s “lumps and bumps,” later worn by artist Christine Sun Kim
- Cardboard architectures. Recurring cardboard environments—runways, wall systems, vernacular fragments—reference shipping infrastructures, Chinatown architectures, and the movement of goods/people
- Porcelain vessels. Press-molded from bound everyday objects (bottles, blouses), these works play on Europe’s historical “bootlegging” of Chinese porcelain while confusing authorship and value.[10]