Consolidated in Relation, 2021-22 by CFGNY

Consolidated in Relation, 2021-22
Glazed porcelain
Series of five unique works
Published on the occasion of Triple Canopy’s 2023 benefit
Courtesy of the artists

For more information, please write to jisu@canopycanopycanopy.com.

Triple Canopy is pleased to present five unique sculptures from Consolidated in Relation, a series created by CFGNY. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the artworks will benefit Triple Canopy’s programs for artists and writers.

The collectively made porcelain sculptures materialize the negative space of assemblies of everyday detritus—cast-off home decor, lunch container waste, packing materials—that CFGNY gathered and arranged to form molds. The resulting shapes are jagged and cracked, their surfaces imprinted faintly with ghosts of the original found objects.

CFGNY, an artist collective composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen, began in 2016 as an ongoing dialogue on the intersection of art, fashion, and identity. The collective continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian,” which highlights an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience that is combined with the experience of being perceived as other. Through their use of fashion as a readymade, alongside a multimedia practice that spans video, performance, architectural installation, and sculpture, CFGNY researches the ways in which material assemblage and reproduction play a part in the formation and racialization of such “vaguely Asian” identities.

The glossy sheen of the works in the series invokes the long history of porcelain as an East Asian export, while the unruly forms of the sculptures stand at odds with their polished texture. With this contrast, CFGNY aims to invoke the idea of “disidentification” as used by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz: a negotiating tactic in which harnessing exclusionary assumptions leads to generative possibility.