CFGNY

CFGNY is a Brooklyn-based collective that uses garments, porcelain, cardboard, and performance to examine how Asian identity is produced and assigned. Their work spans fashion shows with unconventional casts and sculptural installations that engage material culture and racialization.

CFGNY (Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen) works the seam between garment and racialized object, using clothes, porcelain, cardboard, video, and performance to pull apart how "Asian" identity gets produced, circulated, and assigned from the outside. The collective's name is a shape-shifter: Concept Foreign Garments New York, Cute Fucking Gay New York, or something else entirely depending on context: which is the point. Their tailors work in Ho Chi Minh City; their runway casts include artists, chefs, and dry-fish importers; their cardboard architectures quote Chinatown shipping infrastructure and colonial American interiors in the same breath. The question they keep returning to isn't what Asian identity is, but what happens when you treat it as a bootleg: always copying, always drifting, always becoming something new.