CFGNY

Since 2016, New York-based artist collective CFGNY has investigated the transnational circulation of style, addressing a constellation of aesthetics across architecture, contemporary fashion, historical collecting practices, and cultures of cuteness. The group’s practice coalesces around exploring an ineffable but shared recognition of being perceived as other that it calls “vaguely Asian.” Approaching identity and subjectivity as relational endeavours, CFGNY conceives its art-making – integrally collaborative within and beyond the collective – as an act of sociality.

In Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields, the group presents a new body of porcelain sculptures cast from the imprints of cheap household objects manufactured in China, displayed in an architectural construction that offers deliberately partial points of view. Invoking porcelain’s myriad connotations in the western imagination – including its association with Asian skin, its collectability as a symbol of wealth and its historical role as a privileged commodity in early modern trade – CFGNY reflects on the affects and cultural politics of imported Chinese goods.

Biography

CFGNY is an artist collective whose research-based practice takes the form of image making, installation, sculpture, and performance to expand ideas of racialization and subjectivity. Founded in 2016, the collective continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian”: an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. Recent exhibitions, performances and projects include Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (2025), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2024), PIN-UP Magazine, Milan (2023), SculptureCenter, New York (2022), Japan Society, New York (2022), X Museum, Beijing (2021), RISD Museum, Providence (2019), and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018). In October 2024, CFGNY was named Frieze London’s Focus Stand Prize winner for its presentation with Hot Wheels, Athens and London. CFGNY is composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen.