CFGNY’s Refashioning: Redefining Asianness in Art and Fashion
In late January, the Japan Society played host to a unique event that it hadn’t held since the 1970s – a fashion show. The runway show was part of the latest presentation by CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York), a fashion and art collective whose solo New York debut is featured in “Refashioning” at the midtown institution. The members of CFGNY describe themselves as artists who make clothes, and their work redefines Asianness in art and fashion.
Founded in 2016, CFGNY is a four-person collective comprising Daniel Chew, a filmmaker who co-founded Tin Nguyen, along with Kirsten Kilponen and Ten Izu who joined in 2020. All have solo multimedia studio exercises, but they wanted to expand the conversations they had to other people, and they thought the easiest way to do that was to do a fashion show. Together they produce videos, sculptures, installations and performances, all with a focus on redefining and challenging the status quo of Asianness in art and fashion.
CFGNY’s members come from diverse backgrounds, but Chew says the collective is united in part by the sense of “shared alienation” that comes with being Asian in America. They’ve played with themes like mistaken identity and the nature of time in performances and installations across Europe and unearthed Chinese and American historical objects to be displayed alongside their own designs in “can i leave you,” an exhibit at Providence’s RISD Museum.
For “Refashioning,” the four began with a simple question: “What is Japan Society?” The collective was interested in the organization’s founding in 1907 by American businessmen who wanted to increase trade relations with Japan and, by proxy, with China—essentially how an American organization defined Japanese culture and identity for an American audience. While the society’s early days were largely devoted to elite luncheons and soirees, after World War II the organization became a major booster of modern Japanese art and design in the United States.
The collective capitalizes on this heritage by recreating the scene of fancy dinner parties with the common materials of its own practice instead of the more luxurious finishes preferred by society, highlighting the highly manufactured aesthetic that Japan Society uses to define Japan. One of the first things visitors may notice upon entering “Refashioning” sums up CFGNY’s project most succinctly: a looming wall of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting, a makeshift assemblage that speaks to the constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction that animates the collective.
CFGNY’s redefined vision of Asianness is evident in their use of materials. They were struck by the “New York American” look of the architecture of the society’s early headquarters. “When it’s placed in this kind of ‘Japanese’ architecture, there’s this dissonance that’s really at the heart of the story of this place,” says Chew. CFGNY members were also inspired by diasporic travelers’ frequent use of cardboard boxes to ship American goods across Southeast Asia, and they generally find themselves attracted to waste and disappearing materials.
One of the key themes in “Refashioning” is the redefinition of materials. The use of cardboard presents “a very different construction of the idea of Asianness” than the institution’s imported cypress wood roof and slate indoor reflecting pool. “Cardboard is this universal shipping material that moves with people, and materials and people become the same commodity as they move around the world,” they say. “The material conveys this vaguely Asian sense of a cheap export or foreignness in the same way that the Japan Society wants to distill this idea of Japaneseness through its architecture and community programming.”
CFGNY’s and Japan Society’s aesthetics come from “very different class structures.” Consolidated in relation, slate (1 bottle, 1 blouse, 7 vases) (2022) is an example of how CFGNY’s members redefined materials. A green, white, and peach ceramic vessel, at first, appears to be abstract and geometric – made of rectilinear forms disrupted by locks and twists, but on closer inspection, one can see all these impressions that are like ghosts. The 1.50 cm tall vase is not the result of formalist craftsmanship but rather of tying together common consumer items such as bottles and blouses as the basis for a plaster mold, which is then used to create the finished porcelain product. The members of the collective further mixed the authorship by glazing each other’s sculptures.
Under “remodeling,” CFGNY displays its latest creations, including a 2017 silk and cotton piece placed over a cardboard chair modeled after those in the Astor Hotel banquet room, where the party once held their luncheons. CFGNY first experimented with drapery in its 2019–20 exhibition at the RISD Museum, where it placed tailored garments over the furniture and floors, as if strewn by someone making a quick change. And while other pieces were made for this show or debuted on a runway – Mode Max 2 — in January, this dress-like piece comes from “Subtitled,” CFGNY’s first collection.
CFGNY has built relationships over the years with tailors largely patronized by Westerners in Ho Chi Minh City. The results have focused on “signifiers of ‘general Asianness’ like mandarin collars or rice bag jackets that almost look like they’re made of leather. For this photo series, CFGNY gave a Vietnamese photo studio complete freedom to art direct and edit the images of their garments on local models.” The results are glitzy glamor shots, which Nguyen notes are “a really traditional way of creating images within Vietnamese culture,” stylized like the photos his parents took of themselves.
As CFGNY continues to redefine Asianness in art and fashion, it challenges the status quo and encourages conversations about identity and heritage. With thought-provoking installations, fashion shows, and performances, the collective pushes the boundaries of what it means to be Asian in America and invites others to join the conversation.
