In a Chinatown Park, CFGNY Held a Moving Celebration of Asian Art and Community
There was no music in Seward Park on Monday night, no stage light but the setting sun. For the third presentation of CFGNY, the Brooklyn-based fashion-art label from Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew, the focus remained, as before, on the cast of Asian creatives that has swelled around the city. “In the beginning, we wanted to build an Asian community, but now there’s a huge scene,” Nguyen explained. Now, the intent is to grow their own family and draw its members closer.
Hours before, the team gathered at 47 Canal, the Chinatown gallery where CFGNY, which stands for “Concept Foreign Garments New York,” staged their sophomore show last spring. The space functions as a stronghold for Asian artists, and a few of its familiar faces walked the show, namely Cici Wu, a Beijing-born installation artist, who wore a short sheath dress cut from a tangelo orange kid’s blanket. Nick Anderson, cofounder of the beloved queer Asian dance party series Bubble_T, stood by in a khaki work coat and jelly sandals that matched with the also beloved Brooklyn-based artist and drag queen West Dakota.
A strong artistic presence and perspective is what sets CFGNY apart from other upstart labels, which is why Nguyen and Chew were particularly tickled by the presence of Tishan Hsu, a Chinese-American artist whose influential ’80s multimedia work was showcased at Art Basel Hong Kong in March, as well as Benjamin Liu, one of Andy Warhol’s last assistants and a “downtown legend” within New York’s gay Asian community. “Tishan’s work was so ahead of its time, both technological and fleshy in this way that feels really now,” began Chew, “while Benjamin was a gay queer Asian icon who was really functioning in the same way we are now, but as a singular figure,” finished Nguyen.
As for the collection, titled “Surface Trend,” the two continued to explore the ongoing dialogue between East and West that seeps through the entire body of Asian-American art. Specifically, they began with an archipelago of islands off the coast of Vietnam—the country that Nguyen’s family comes from and where the label’s clothes are produced in the capital, Ho Chi Minh City—which has seen a new influx of international visitors and been changed by it. “They built the longest gondola in the world,” said Nguyen. “It’s supposed to look like ancient ruins, somewhere between Rome and Athens, with columns and a Venetian fountain, then the actual islands are tiki-themed. It’s their interpretation of what they think international people are coming to the island to see, and we were inspired by this miscommunication.”
CFGNY Collection 3
There were puffed coats, deconstructed and reconstructed from counterfeit North Face jackets commonly found in Vietnam, where factories used to produce the genuine articles and continued on once the real business had left. “We’re continuing a lot of the original ideas around the bootleg, but using bootleg parts rather than bootleg names,” Nguyen said. The thick cartoon blankets returned as the dress worn by Wu, while the kiddie bath mat vest became a bee and strawberry wrap skirt, a standout look worn by publicist Cynthia Leung with a fetching mockneck tee on top: brown and black spandex swirled with gold and patched with a pretty pink velvet floral. With it, she wore a series of gold chains owned by her mother in the ’70s, one of several family heirlooms brought by models from their personal collections.
“There’s a real feeling of community,” Benjamin Liu observed of the familial warmth that defined their day. Chinchakriya Un, a friend of Nguyen’s who hosts Cambodian pop-up dinners as Kreung, catered the lunch, which finished with an aluminum bin piled with shards of sarai, or fresh kiwi and strawberries encased in green pandan and white coconut jelly. A few blocks away, in Seward Park, the crowd calmly gathered in a circle, as children scampered up and down the jungle gyms on either side. They sat without pretension, cross-legged on the pavement, a few fanning themselves in the summer heat. Others clambered onto the play equipment, choosing to perch on a hot pink railing or stand at the top of the slide.
“Are those the actors?” one child called out as the cast of 22 figures began their performance, a creative collaboration with artist Carissa Rodriguez and stylist Avena Gallagher. Choreographed by Stephen Kwok and Kiyoto Koseki, they walked in loose patterns, stopping to stand among the crowd or circle around the gravel path, as though they were ordinary parkgoers. They moved silently to nothing but the sound of birds and laughing children. Twenty minutes passed by in a moment, the crowd seemingly spellbound beneath the sun and sky and trees. When all was said and done, the crew packed up, returned to the gallery, and went out for family dim sum.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
