A full-size stepped bridge wrapped in brown synthetic fur straddles the front gallery of Amant in Brooklyn, arching above the concrete floor. Around it, 20 glazed ceramic tiles are arranged on mirror-topped, framework plinths of varying heights to construct an uneven terrain. These paired works—Fuzzy Bridge and Landscape Composition (both 2026)—form the central sculptural proposition of CFGNY’s current exhibition “Puddles into Pond.” They are accompanied by a third installation in the rear gallery, where five water clocks connect to a single 45-gallon plastic tank suspended overhead via clear PVC tubing. Though seemingly unconnected, these works extend an inquiry that CFGNY has been developing for a decade as it examines the materials through which Asianness reaches the West and how one lives through that mediation.
CFGNY was founded in 2016 by Daniel Chew and Tin Nguyen, later joined by Ten Izu. The collective’s organizing concept, “vaguely Asian,” is not simply a refusal of reductive identity labels. For diasporic artists working in the West, “authentic” Asianness is nothing if not highly mediated: by trade, copy, circulation, and the racializing gaze that sorts bodies and objects into a single category. In its practice, CFGNY takes the matter through which that mediation happens and treats it as the substance of diasporic life as it is actually lived. It makes art from, for example, the cheap garments stitched in Vietnamese workshops (where the collective works with local tailors); the cardboard that protects commodities crossing the Pacific; and the porcelain that European kilns spent two centuries trying to reproduce from Chinese imports. In the collective’s hands, these are not loaded symbols so much as the material residues of mediation.
By the early 2020s, the garments and discrete objects of CFGNY’s early projects had scaled up into full-room installations. Continuous Fractures Generating New Yields (2025), first shown at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and reinstalled for the 2026 Whitney Biennial, presents porcelain sculptures cast from cheap household objects manufactured in China, set within an architectural structure that fragments sightlines and draws on porcelain’s layered meanings in the Western imagination. In “The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin,” a group exhibition at Pioneer Works this spring, the collective covered the gallery in cardboard and installed a series of photographs depicting the young entrepreneurs and influencers in Ho Chi Minh City who are reshaping Vietnam’s garment production infrastructure. What links these projects is the insistence on working at the scale of the room. The viewer does not encounter CFGNY’s porcelain or photographs from the outside; the work is entered rather than observed.
In “Puddles into Pond,” the inquiry shifts. The question is no longer limited to which materials carry Asianness across the Pacific, but whether they can be worked through the premise of collective labor. Ceramic, which had previously entered CFGNY’s practice only as slip-cast porcelain, is now hand-built for the first time; water appears at the scale of a room-spanning system. The 20 tiles of Landscape Composition were each shaped, fired, and glazed individually, their surfaces bearing the unevenness of the process. Thirteen collaborators, none identifying as ceramicists—Cole Lu and Lotus L. Kang among them—were invited to CFGNY’s studio as participants. What characterizes the group is neither inherited tradition nor specialized skill, but a shared willingness to enter an unfamiliar medium, treating the studio as a site where expertise is negotiated in the making rather than brought in advance.
The tiles do not cohere formally, and they are not meant to. Lu’s, in dark unglazed stoneware, carries an incised cityscape with miniature architectural ruins rising from a surface cracked clean down the center. Kang’s piece gleams like stainless steel, evoking the radiating channels of a lotus root. These unrelated objects are turned into a landscape not only by the wood-and-mirror armature that holds them in spatial relation, but also by an invoked historical reference to the No Name Painting Association (Wuming Huahui), an informal group of self-taught artists active in Beijing between 1973 and 1981. Its members met covertly on the city’s outskirts to paint landscapes in oil, in a deliberate turn away from the revolutionary subjects demanded of sanctioned art during the Cultural Revolution. Whereas the Association employed landscape as a means to paint freely as individuals outside state demands, CFGNY uses it to hold distinct makers together without collapsing individual authorship. The pond is made of 20 discrete puddles, held by an armature that does not pretend they amount to a unified body of water. Fuzzy Bridge is not a separate work but the condition under which Landscape Composition becomes inhabitable. Climbing it in socks, the viewer is lifted above the tiles and positioned to survey the scene.
In the rear gallery, that same tension plays out in water. System (Five Times) (2026) names the whole arrangement: five water clocks fed by the overhead tank, with water cycled through the tubing by an electric pump. The irregular drip between vessels provides the room’s constant sound. Water is heavily loaded in writing about the Asian diaspora—with recurring maritime histories of crossing and migration—but here it is more material than metaphor. It is, first, the substance that physically binds the five clocks into a single dependent system, and second, the medium through which time becomes legible as something other than uniform measurement. The five timepieces keep their own rhythms, but none runs independently of the others.
Each clock also absorbs an earlier strand of CFGNY’s practice. In System (Painting), three small oil landscapes flank an exposed gear mechanism, so that landscape painting—calling upon the No Name Painting Association’s medium—becomes the literal face of the timepiece. System (Animal) holds glazed ceramic creatures among its gears, extending the tiles of the front gallery. System (Figure) is a cardboard mannequin in a sheer garment, and System (Bags) consists of two hanging clear vinyl totes stitched with chenille patches; together, these two clocks fold fashion—CFGNY’s best-known medium—into the kinetic arrangement. The final clock, System (Monument), is a tapered obelisk lined with wallpaper, another material that the collective has used to think through appropriation and mediation. What these clocks measure is not standardized time, but the upkeep required to keep them running. They gather a decade of CFGNY’s work into a single arrangement that holds its past not as archive or chronology but as an active circuit—a body of practice that continues only because its earlier parts remain in use. The press release calls this a refusal of “capitalist quantification.” What the work proposes is narrower and more useful: that a practice continues not as a sequence of finished objects but as a system that must be sustained.
“Puddles into Pond,” which makes the relation between CFGNY’s materials and the labor required to hold a collective together newly specific, locates its coherence in 13 pairs of hands and five clocks that need tending. This is the structural claim embedded in the show: a collective is not a standing body but a pattern of labor that has to be continually renewed for the collective to remain one. In the current moment—with escalating tariffs on Asian-made goods and renewed pressures on Asian diasporic life in the West—that claim is not abstract. The conditions to which the exhibition responds are the same ones eroding the labor it foregrounds.
“Puddles into Pond” is on view at Amant, Brooklyn, through August 16, 2026.
