I’ve been attending CFGNY’s shows since 2019, when their runway presentation was in Chinatown’s Seward Park, and the proportion of clued-in spectators to confused onlookers in the audience was low. But in 2026, the artist collective is a hot ticket for institutional curators, and their conceptual work more relevant to fashion than perhaps anything actually on the New York Fashion Week calendar.
Last Friday, on a real Don DeLillo-ass summer night in a Brooklyn parking lot one day after AQI had risen hysterically to between 200 and 300 (“very unhealthy” for everyone), CFGNY—whose core current members are artists Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen—staged an ambitious, multimedia interpolation of the history of video art. Presented by the Kitchen with the private foundation Amant (whose East Williamsburg space hosts CFGNY’s sculpture exhibition “Puddles into Pond“), produced in collaboration with stylist and Telfar fashion director Avena Gallagher, the group’s fifth fashion presentation delivered more than 30 looks. CFG—20260717, it’s called—a straightforward timestamp of a title for a complex collection.
For the better part of a decade, CFGNY has, in both their exhibitions and runway shows, critically examined how identity is constructed, and how race is something done to a subject. In short, some artists get to be “artists” while others are obliged to be “Asian American artists.” CFGNY makes light of these constrictions, owns them, tweaks them, and jettisons them at will in collaboration with a dizzyingly talented cohort of other artists, photographers, models, chefs, and so on. Hailing from New York and abroad, they are brought into CFGNY’s ever-unfolding conceptual, aesthetic, and social universe, one whose self-consciously unclear bounds are underscored by their deceptively nonchalant term for the project: “vaguely Asian.”
Back in 2017, CFGNY—a mutable acronym sometimes standing for Cute Fucking Gay New York—cast its first show through photos on Instagram. As they later observed of the social media image for a 2022 essay in VISCOSE, “The photo itself [was] an information packet: the making of the photo is where the making of the work, the ‘We’ is…We become ‘We’ through the dissemination of these images within corporate, user-generated content channels.” If contemporary artworks exist now to circulate as poor, low-res images of themselves, last week’s runway show self-reflexively embraced a further absurdity of the live-streamed life, inflicted on us by the front-facing iPhone camera lens—the one “we” use to look at ourselves while imagining another—the other’s?—eyes.
Taking my seat in the front row under the open and relatively haze-less sky, I happily found myself next to my former editor-in-chief David Velasco, leaving my Critics’ Table confrère Domenick Ammirati to scope out the crowd. (The Artforum diarist for the evening was seated elsewhere.) As I gathered my thoughts and waited for the performance to begin, true to form, fashionably late, I spotted former MoMA associate director Kathy Halbreich among the crowd’s lineup, along with MoMA curator Stuart Comer, Artists Space director Jay Sanders, and Dia assistant curator Min Sun Jeon.
CFGNY’s principals began by delivering introductory remarks, staring into three video cameras placed in the round, with Tin singling out the 1967 Sony Portapak—a landmark technological development in the emergence of experimental video art—as part of the vaguely Asian extended universe. He then delivered a capsule history lesson on Joan Jonas’s canonical 1972 videotape Vertical Roll, which the artist made by interposing her body (via a simple performance) with a glitching, slipping video signal. On twin, idling trucks that also functioned as screens, slides of work by Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha appeared, along with a compact introduction to Woody and Steina Vasulka, who founded the Kitchen in 1971.
All this came after Ten and Daniel walked into the arena of the show, the latter in a knee-length plaid skirt—to qualify it as a kilt would be cultural appropriation!—and soft slippers. At this point, I thought the runway show had begun, and was somewhat nonplussed when Angelique Rosales Salgado, the Kitchen’s assistant curator and emcee for the night, addressed us with questions that slowed the horizontal roll of the evening. Given the truck engines blowing soft tufts of exhaust, the buzz of the overhead drone documenting the event for posterity, and Friday’s AQI score predicted to bounce back that evening—rude health!—I thought, Let’s cut to the feeling—show, don’t tell, the goods!
After the momentum had slowed to a tease, finally, models began to stream in and around the set, with the singular maven of moves in all realms, publicist Cynthia Leung setting the pace and tone (she is credited in the program notes as the dramaturgist). Decisively queering the air, a model sashayed in wearing a wine-dark pair of one-legged trousers, highlighting by default a pair of plaid drawers. A gray, faux fur stole of stuffed animals was dragged—Oh, the inhumanity! They appeared to stumble, but the telltale sign of a gasp-inducing ankle roll, itself a fashion show trope, turned out to be a feint, a smooth stunt. Dancer Elliot Reed (the performance’s movement director) told me at the afterparty that it was the Vito Acconci reference amongst an array of other historical video or performance art citations.
What became most compelling though, as more models poured into the lot, was how some of them, perhaps most memorably Diane Severin Nguyen, wielded phones to broadcast their own POV onto the truck screens. It’s a move that cites the present. “We” do it every time we choose to experience an event by documenting it with our machines, rather than by logging sensory perception with that older recording technology: the body (perhaps the same one that I’ve heard “keeps the score”). Fashion and art consumers seem to generally prefer second-hand experience, and what they had here was an opportunity to photograph the models, other subjects, converting themselves into compressed “information packets,” suitable for keywording as “avant-garde,” “beautiful,” or “Asian.” Freedom of choice. All while wearing adorable animal backpacks that took over their backs, as on the artist Sung Tieu, hump-like, pairing well with kitten-heeled, pointy mules. To be cute, distributable, and hot is to be on the cutting edge of image technology. CFGNY and I know this—we were literally both in the “Cute” show in London ca. 2024.
Clashing plaid prints abounded and open-weave tops made a Swiss cheese of who “we” are becoming—transparent patchwork creatures of citation. This is a very serious kind of comedy, and it’s the underlying concept of ordinary life in a city like New York. There’s no such thing as an “Asian” person in Asia, and the original is something imaginary, as philosopher Byung-Chul Han said. The performance ended with Tin holding up his phone to the POV of the screen and transferring the feed to a first-person ride on a moped in Vietnam, the country where CFGNY began collaborating with local tailors. A generative mistranslation of the artists ensued, resulting in aggressively synthetic clothes for any character in this ongoing story—adorable and alone, fabulous and aggrieved, or safe in numbers. Recording his screen off the truck screen, the iPhone photographers in the audience captured remediated images of lurid or clashing red, green, and blue graphic areas, the compositions less like stable portraiture than weather maps of smoke. Like the electricity of telecommunications, it’s an airborne event, Jack.
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