West Elm’s ceramics residency welcomes its newest members
Meet CFGNY, a four-person collective exploring Asian identity through art and fashion.
A dormant ceramics studio at our product design facility gave senior studio manager Gary Webb an idea. He spearheaded an initiative to reimagine the space and host established and emerging BIPOC artists who don’t have access to a traditional ceramics studio to explore the medium.
“We’re a Brooklyn-based company, so artists are in our backyard,” says Gary. “It’s easy for them to get here and create new work.” This year, eight artists in residence will each have 12 weeks of full studio access, plus the assistance of a ceramic technician to help with things like running the kilns and monitoring the drying process.
Our third resident is a collective: founders Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew, plus Kirsten Kilponen and Ten Izu, who together make up CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York, or a slew of other acronyms they’ve invented). Formed in 2016, the group began using fashion to engage in conversation about globalization and what it means to be Asian-American. “We knew that fashion requires a lot of people, and it was a way for us to collaborate, to get our friends involved,” Daniel says.
Getting along, most of the time
“Working in a collective allows you to make really ambitious work that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to even physically bring together. All of this labor and different skill sets create projects that are actually quite impossible to make as an individual,” Tin says.
Clothing in conversation with clay
Identifying as members of the Asian diaspora, CFGNY has specific interests in clothing and porcelain (a type of ceramic)—both of which are generally produced in China and Southeast Asia. Through their work, they explore how forms rooted in this region have, through the flow of history, made their way around the world. In our studio, they focused on the intersection of these two mediums. “Porcelain is often spoken about like skin and body. We’re glazing all of these works, it’s like we’re putting clothes on them and handing them off to each other to continue styling,” Ten jokes.
“We’re constantly in dialogue with each other. So it does feel like this flow of friendship, but also professional work. I think as an artist, it feels like where I want to be.”
—Daniel Chew
“Giving form to the space in between”
For each work, the group began with found objects, a reference to imported goods whose origins consumers may not consider. They’d place them together and create a positive of the space between those objects. Next, they would make a mold of that positive and cast that into hollow forms. “It’s very much like a metaphor for how this work exists in between all of us,” Daniel says.
During their residency, the artists discovered the true power of the collective: Plugging holes as plaster leaked. With each pre-existing vessel, vase and object they would fill up, the process often resulted in plaster “exploding out of the side like a fire hydrant.” Turns out, working together is better than working alone.
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