CFGNY’s New York Spring: A Whitney Biennial Debut, a Pioneer Works Group Show, and an Amant Installation Built for Walking
On a recent evening in Brooklyn, visitors at Amant were asked to do something that quietly rearranged the usual museum choreography: pull booties over their shoes, then step onto a bridge of synthetic fur and cross an invented landscape. The work is part of “Puddles into Pond,” a new installation by CFGNY, the New York collective whose practice moves between fashion, institutional critique, and collaborative experiment.
The project arrives amid an unusually concentrated season for the trio. CFGNY made their Whitney Biennial debut earlier this month with an installation that combines mirrors, plywood, and a hybrid, “Frankensteined” stuffed animal. They are also included in Pioneer Works’ Red Hook group exhibition “The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin.” The overlap was not engineered as a takeover, the artists have said, but the timing has the effect of a three-part portrait: fashion, institution, and experiment, each emphasized in a different venue.
CFGNY formed about a decade ago, beginning as an informal collaboration between Chew and Nguyen, who were co-workers at the Chinatown gallery 47 Canal. Their early partnership grew out of shared questions around Asian diasporic identity and expanded through practical intimacy: making clothes together, sharing studio space, pooling resources, and offering critique. A few years later, Izu joined after interning at the same gallery.
Even the collective’s name, “Corporate Global Fashion New York,” signals the tone: deadpan, sharply legible, and alert to internet-era language without leaning on it as a punchline. That sensibility extends to a guiding concept the group calls the “vaguely Asian,” which they describe less as a fixed identity than as a shifting condition of legibility — an affective zone shaped by both self-definition and the perceptions imposed from outside.
Chew has framed the idea as a response to how conversations around race have changed since the group began working together in 2016. At the time, they observed a pressure toward “authenticity,” a demand that artists perform heritage in familiar, consumable narratives. CFGNY resisted that expectation. For them, “vaguely Asian” is not a sentimental story about family recipes; it is a way to speak about the lived experience of being racialized. Race, the artists emphasize, is not a stable category but an ongoing process.
At Amant, that process is staged through collectivity and participation. “Puddles into Pond” takes cues from the Beijing-based No Name Painting Association (Wuming Huahui), a loosely organized group that gathered in secrecy during China’s Cultural Revolution — the sociopolitical movement led by Mao Zedong from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s — to paint landscapes en plein air. The association’s legacy has been linked to later developments in Chinese modernism. CFGNY draws on that history as a framework for thinking about what it means to make art together under constraint, and about how Western institutions often “process” art by Asian artists with a particular set of expectations.
The installation’s central image is a pond assembled from 18 ceramic tiles, each made by a different collaborator invited into CFGNY’s studio. Joined together, the tiles become a composite surface: a landscape built from discrete contributions rather than a single authorial hand. Spanning it is the fur bridge, which functions as both sculpture and invitation. Visitors are encouraged to cross, their steps mediated by the booties — a small, practical gesture that also carries cultural charge.
Nguyen has pointed to the custom of removing shoes before entering an Asian household, imagining an opening night in which the room might fill with shoes. In “Puddles into Pond,” that domestic code expands outward into questions of belonging, territory, and who is permitted to enter — and under what terms. The bridge offers a vantage point that feels like surveying a terrain, but it also makes the viewer’s body part of the work’s social logic.
Taken together with the Whitney Biennial presentation and the Pioneer Works exhibition, CFGNY’s spring run reads as more than a scheduling coincidence. It is a triangulation of methods: the language of fashion and branding, the pressures and permissions of institutions, and the open-endedness of experiment. In each setting, the collective returns to the same insistence: not simply what Asian identity is supposed to look like, but how it is made legible — and by whom.
“Puddles into Pond” is on view at Amant in Brooklyn, with CFGNY also appearing in the Whitney Biennial and in “The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin” at Pioneer Works in Red Hook.
