CFGNY

In conjunction with the exhibition CFGNY: Puddles into Pond at Amant (March 19–August 16, 2026), CFG-20260717 is a performance co-commissioned by The Kitchen and Amant, presented as part of The Kitchen’s Without Walls program on Friday, July 17, 2026, 7–10pm at 316 Ten Eyck. The project activates 316 Ten Eyck, Amant’s dynamic 12,500-square-foot open-air lot neighboring its galleries and campus. The performance runs from 7:30–8:30pm with a block party culminating the evening from 8:30–10pm. DJ to be announced. The program is free with RSVP encouraged.

CFGNY is a collaboration between artists Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen. Established in 2016, the collective has developed a research-driven practice across fashion, painting, ceramics, photography, and installation that examines Asian diasporic histories through what the artists describe as “vaguely Asian” aesthetics, mobilizing strategies of stylization and replication to complicate ideas of origin, authorship, and value. CFGNY treats identity as mutable, stylized, and performative, foregrounding the conditions under which it becomes legible while remaining strangely abstracted, unstable, or resistant to fixed interpretation. Approaching identity and subjectivity as relational endeavours, CFGNY displaces singular narratives of place and history and conceives its art-making—integrally collaborative within and beyond the collective—as an act of sociality.

The exhibition takes its conceptual point of departure from the No Name Painting Association (无名画会 Wuming Huahui), an amorphous group of self-taught artists active in Beijing between 1973 and 1981. Their practice represented not only an aesthetic refusal, but a subversive reconfiguration of collectivity away from the centralized planning of institutional sanction. CFGNY considers this legacy as a framework for thinking about collective practice under conditions of constraint, where the exhibition as a whole considers how collectivity is formed and sustained under regimes that seek to measure, monetize, and regulate time, bodies, and expression. A pop-up store transforming Amant’s gallery reception area invites the audience to wear and acquire garments from CFGNY’s capsule collection throughout the duration of the exhibition. Published by Amant, a forthcoming monograph of CFGNY's practice spanning the past ten years will be released in Fall 2026.

The performance CFG-20260717 builds upon the group’s multi-year research engagement in The Kitchen’s institutional archive. The artists explore how the development and circulation of emerging video technologies from Asia, specifically the Sony Portapak in Japan, the first one-person operated, self-contained video camera and playback unit introduced in 1967, enabled the artistic pursuits that sustained The Kitchen’s founding in 1971. This is the history of the emergence of video art in New York City; a period of creative experimentation that marked a shift in the physical and emotional relationship between the body, the gaze, the screen, and the archival record, concurrent to the artist communities that grew out of the medium’s accessibility.

At Amant’s 316 Ten Eyck outdoor venue, CFGNY synthesizes this history through performance and fashion (using both interchangeably) and examine it within an inter-connected dialogue of race, value, labor, and exchange, reconfiguring established narratives of the “avant-garde.” CFG-20260717 debuts the artists’ fifth presentation of fashion—a new collection of garments produced in situ with tailors in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In collaboration with stylist and frequent collaborator Avena Gallagher, CFGNY stages over thirty looks on an ensemble of performers sited within a sculptural set constructed with materials recurrent in their practice, such as wooden 2x4’s and translucent plastic. The scaffolded structure is inset with numerous LED monitors displaying alternating video feeds captured via a choreography of cameras wielded by the artists and performers, together taking form as a glowing light box in the middle of the parking lot that nods to the site of accelerated image transmission.

CFGNY initiates the live work through the form of lecture–performance, a strategy that extends research, study, and image-making into discursive sociality. The performance evolves and unravels into a theatrical environment of scenography and movement direction by artist Elliot Reed, punctuated by artists and musicians LYDO and Drew McDowall’s sound design, dramaturgy by Cynthia Leung, and lighting design by Sarai Frazier. Casting is a community-building fixture of CFGNY’s performances—some figures are life-long childhood friends (Chinchakriya Un), others are artists and interlocutors with whom they have sustained long-term collaborations (Sung Tieu, Stewart Uoo, Lumi Tan, Cole Lu, Cici Wu, Diane Severin Nguyen, Paul Pfeiffer), in addition to other individuals who have intersected both with CFGNY and The Kitchen’s storied legacy of video, music, performance, and dance.

CFG-20260717 is co-commissioned by The Kitchen and Amant and organized by Angelique Rosales Salgado, Assistant Curator, The Kitchen, and Tobi Maier, Chief Curator, Amant.

Production by Stuart Lorimer, Director of Operations, Joseph Euoi Lee, Production and Public Programs Associate, Tom Forkin, Production and Technical Coordinator, Amant, David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen, and William Morgan IV, Styling Coordinator, CFGNY.