Architectural remnants of cardboard and porcelain stand scattered across Bel Ami gallery, like elegant queer ruins. “Import Imprint”, curated by Talia Heiman, is CFGNY’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles. Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kristen Kilponen and Tin Nguyen form the New York-based collective known as Concept Foreign Garments New York (CFGNY), sometimes referred to as Cute Fucking Gay New York. The exhibition is a culmination of the group’s ongoing interest in US consumer culture and reproduction, as it relates to Asian American identity, or what they refer to as “bootleg identity.” 

Fragments of familiar household objects such as vases, clothing, and toys sit precariously on inoperable ledges and suspended from the ceiling – devoid of their original function. The porcelain casts appear inverted and mutilated, mass-produced yet unique. The object’s fissures and seams, held together by welded steel braces, serve as a metaphor for fractured and imaginative Asian Diasporic identity. These metamorphic objects are set against wallpaper by Asher Brown Durand, which depicts a bucolic colonial-era landscape painting reproduced from pixelated images found online. This play between past and present is a purposeful nod to the post-WWII era in the US, which saw the popularization of porcelain goods in American homes. Porcelain homeware, appropriated from Asia, became mass-produced symbols of modern American sophistication. CFGNY’s focus on this refined earthenware speaks to a larger conversation about the history of material culture and global trade across the Pacific. Porcelain itself becomes the metaphor for how these economic and political factors impact modes of identity formation. These are “bootleg identities,” which perpetually morph and expand, as they furiously metabolize and transform in the face of global exchange. CFGNY presents imagined archaeological remnants that softly whisper stories of diasporic origins and the pull of America’s amalgamated culture.

Bel Ami 
709 N. Hill Street #105
Los Angeles, CA 90012
On view through May 21, 2022