Puddles into Pond

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.

Puddles into Pond 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. Working during the Cultural Revolution, in a political climate where art was expected to conform to Socialist Realist depictions of revolutionary subjects, Wuming met covertly in the suburbs and outskirts of Beijing to practice landscape painting en plein air. Their practice represented not only an aesthetic refusal, but a subversive reconfiguration of collectivity away from the centralized planning of institutional sanction.

At Amant, CFGNY pays homage to and builds on this legacy as a framework for thinking about collective practice under conditions of constraint. The collective has constructed an artificial landscape traversed by a bridge clad in stuffed animal fur. This environment is ornamented with eighteen dish-like ceramic tiles produced by fourteen invited friends, peers, and long-standing collaborators. Mounted together on a shared armature, these vessels together suggest an abstracted pond, each functioning as an individual receptacle that contributes to a larger, composite surface. The gatherings, conversations, and shared labor that produced the tiles are an integral component of the resulting sculpture itself; in this way, the installation extends CFGNY’s ongoing interest in collective production, echoing the Wuming group’s creation of landscapes as a quietly radical communal act.