The Fashion-Art Collective Captivating New York, One Furry Bridge at a Time

The air was whirring with the low hum of compression pumps, and a shaggy, synthetic fur brown plush bridge cut a path through mirrored plinths displaying miniature ceramic worlds. Overhead, a looming plastic tank suspended at the center of the ceiling circulated water through an intricate system of clear tubes to a variety of absurdist kinetic sculptures. You’ve entered the world of CFGNY.

Last week, the New York–based Asian-American art/fashion collective—founded by Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen, were mid-install of their just-opened exhibition “Puddles into Pond.” The show runs until August 16.at the Bushwick, Brooklyn art campus Amant. The trio is perhaps best known for their made-to-order garments produced in Vietnam, participatory performance art runway shows, and wielding stuffed animals as both objects and avatars. Their broad practice bucks easy categorization and, with a vibe that can seem insidiously sunny but incorporates raw construction materials and plush figures as vehicles to broach bigger issues: of labor, of identity, of value.

CFGNY formed a decade ago. Chew and Nguyen, co-workers at the gallery 47 Canal, were bound by overlapping questions around Asian diasporic identity. The two started making clothes together and started an informal collaboration—sharing studio space, resources, and critique. A deliberate structure emerged, symbolized in the collective’s name itself, “Corporate Global Fashion New York”; deadpan clarity, meme-aware, but not meme-adjacent. Izu entered the fold a few years later after interning for the same Chinatown gallery.

CFGNY approaches such big ideas with something they call the “vaguely Asian,” a quasi-manifesto ideology the collective plumbs as an informal mission statement. Rather than a fixed identity, vaguely Asian is a condition of legibility in flux, an affective field shaped as much by external perception as by self-definition. “When we first started in 2016, the conversation around race was in a very different place,” Chew said. “It had to do with authenticity where it felt like everyone was mining their heritage in a particular way.

“We weren’t interested in doing that,” Chew continued. “The idea [of ‘vaguely Asian’] is less a story about your grandma and her dumplings and more about a lived experience of being racialized.” Race, as the artists repeatedly emphasize, is a process.

Spring Triple-Header

Those questions unfold across three major projects in New York this season. The collective had their Whitney Biennial debut earlier this month. an installation uses mirrors, plywood, and a Frankensteined stuffed animal. They are also part of the group show at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, “The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin.” “We didn’t plan it,” Nguyen said of the simultaneous shows. “We were talking to multiple curators.” But together, these exhibitions form what the trio describes as a triangulation and represent the pillars of their broad practice: fashion, institution, and experiment.

“Puddles into Pond” represents the most experimental aspects of their practice. CFGNY were inspired by the Beijing-based No Name Painting Association (Wuming Huahui), a loosely organized group of artists who gathered in secrecy during China’s Cultural Revolution, a sociopolitical movement led by Mao Zedong from the late ’60s to mid-’70s, largely based on a unified “pure” Chinese culture, to paint landscapes en plein air. The collective’s impact is manifold, having been attributed to Chinese modernism thereafter. For CFGNY, this history becomes a framework for thinking about collectivity under the constraint of this Western nation that processes art by Asian people with a predilection. Where this process is unavoidable, CFGNY is steadfast in highlighting the “how.”

At Amant, this takes the form of an artificial landscape populated by 18 ceramic tiles, each produced by collaborators invited into CFGNY’s studio. Mounted together, they form a composite “pond,” a surface built from discrete contributions. The synthetic fur bridge that spans the pond, and extends a participatory invitation. Visitors are encouraged to walk across it, booties slipped over their shoes. It also ties into their ‘vaguely Asian’ ethos.

“I like the idea that during the opening this room could just be filled with shoes,” says Nguyen in response to the custom of taking one’s shoes off to enter an Asian household. But the domestic codes expand even more into concepts of belonging and territory. “The perspective you get from the bridge is like surveying a landscape of all the different artists who we collaborated with to make the show,” says Izu, gesturing toward the ceramic pieces, now creating a new vantage like city-states in a fictional world.

At Pioneer Works, CFGNY reframe fashion and luxury through the lens of Vietnam’s garment production infrastructure, tracing the flows of labor and export that have long shaped global perceptions of Asianness. The collective’s piece at the Whitney Biennial, Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields (initially developed from a project with Cooper Hewitt), positions mirrors as apertures in an installation of wood boards and semi-translucent plastic, refracting ceramic forms through oblique vantage points.

If the Whitney installation interrogates perception, and Pioneer Works examines circulation, Amant becomes a site of synthesis, a place where CFGNY’s headier ideas can unfold. It is also, notably, a space that allowed for this level of experimentation. As Nguyen points out, the scale and flexibility of Amant made it possible to develop the work in situ, to treat installation as an evolving process rather than a fixed endpoint.

“Working as a collective, they collapse distinctions between disciplines, offering a model of authorship rooted in community and collaboration,” said Drew Sawyer who co-curated the Biennial. “I’m particularly excited that we could feature both their clothing in the shop and a large installation with multiple aspects of their practice in the galleries.”

This distinction between institutional constraint and experimental freedom feeds into a broader conversation about the state of the art world. “Institutional success used to kind of guarantee commercial success,” Chew said. “But those worlds have kind of diverged.” The Whitney Biennial, long considered a career-making milestone, no longer ensures financial stability or gallery representation.

CFGNY’s practice can be understood as a response to precarity through reconfiguration of what an arts system could look like. Rather than relying solely on institutional validation, they have built an ecosystem that sustains itself through mutual support, shared resources, and diversified income streams. Their fashion practice, for instance, operates as both artistic medium and economic strategy, generating revenue that can be reinvested into more experimental projects.

Fashion as Infrastructure

“Fashion is like our soft power,” Nguyen said. “Easiest example I have is, we’ll post a really long text that we’ve worked so hard on and have researched so deeply, and no one cares. But you post a model and you get all these views.” At Amant, there is even a miniature gift shop where limited-edition stuffed animals and garments from past projects are available for purchase. Fare includes some of the kookier garments from past CFGNY collections, like patchwork-style blouses, matching teddy bear-printed separates, and a shear dress that reveals a gestating, fetal teddybear.

“[The store] is our way of hedging the economic viability of the project by trying to diversify our streams of income,” Chew said. “A very important part of that is selling accessible items, like a CFGNY stuffed animal.” The merch is not a secondary gesture but an integral part of the work. “It’s hard to sell collectives to the collector,” he continued. “They want more of a ‘singular genius,’ sort of the persona behind the object they collect. The stuffed animals are more universal, they’re designed to be collected.” It invites audiences to engage without the prohibitive barrier of acquiring a unique artwork, reframing consumption as participation rather than exclusion.

“The fashion shows created a very necessary energy around what otherwise might be hard to engage with,” Izu chimes in. “It’s such an ‘art’ word, but the Gestalt. That and relatability is how we approach all of our work.”

And yet, for all its complexity, CFGNY’s work remains grounded in a deceptively simple question: what is art, and what does it do? Toward the end of our conversation, I ask them directly: is fashion art?

CFGNY collectively replies yes. Another question: would something need to be deemed as art to be valuable? And this response doesn’t deflect as much as it proposes something the art world knows to be true: the assignation of value is arbitrary, therefore can be whatever you’d like it to be. CFGNY, Chew says, prefers to sidestep categorization “in favor of serving people.” “What matters is not whether something qualifies as art, but what that designation enables,” continues Nguyen. What systems of value it activates, what forms of attention it commands.

CFGNY, in this sense, is a collective less interested in defining art than in interrogating its infrastructure with their own processes as intervention. Why are certain objects deemed worthy of preservation, while others are dismissed? How does value circulate, and who benefits from its distribution? What happens when those systems are reimagined, even temporarily?

In “Puddles into Pond,” these questions take on a physical form. There is less a discrete offering than a coalescence into shared artistic terrain, where individual contributions will always pool into something larger.

Izu concluded, “Anything can be art if you shift the terms around.”