Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga
Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga, installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–August 4, 2024. Photography by Sarah Golonka.
When I walk into the first room of the gallery, a tidal wave of white sheeting crests from floor to ceiling, bifurcating the entryway and creating an instant tension. I cannot see the entire space at once, instead having to walk around and work around the obstruction. It feels like the artists want it this way. Everything is freely given, but nothing is made easy in Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga, a joint exhibition on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
CFGNY, short for Concept Foreign Garments New York, is an artist collective comprised of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen, whose work ranges widely across design, video, sculpture, and installation. CFGNY centers their investigations around the term "vaguely Asian," the way in which cultural understandings and othered identities are represented and remade. Wataru Tominaga is a fashion designer and artist based in Japan whose works incorporate unique textile manipulations and challenge preconceived notions of gender. Tominaga explores clothing's ability to transform, utilizing an array of structures, patterns, and colors to craft an embodied shell that at once conceals and creates. CFGNY is based in New York and Tominaga is based in Tokyo; in this show together they cross borders and interrogate transnational conceptions of Asian and Asian-American identity.
Fittingly, Refashioning debuted in New York at the Japan Society, an organization that promotes Japanese culture in the United States, and the exhibition incorporates pieces from the founding of the Japan Society and its historical relevance as a space devoted to Japanese-American cross-cultural exchange. Now it's here in Los Angeles, smack dab in between the twin metropolises.
CFGNY, 33.734689889820174, -118.24125148516681 / Directions from here / Directions to here / What's here? / Add a missing place / Terminal Island, CA, 2024. Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper. 20 3/4 × 16 7/8 in. (52.7 × 42.9 cm). Courtesy of CFGNY.
At first glance, the individual works of the artists do not seem to mesh. Indeed, the show is less of a shared exhibition than two distinct displays of artists who utilize different mediums to address similar concepts. In the first room on either side of the curtained barrier, photography hangs on the walls. This is the CFGNY section of the exhibit. The photographs are of stuffed animals—emblems of ambiguous cuteness—against harsh, unwelcoming landscapes. The toys are not typical teddy bears or poodles; they are amorphous fishes (blob-like clouds with eyes, something like a moray eel) or pandas with a button mouth. They defy easy identification as the toys we grew up with, instead harkening back to a childhood that never existed; in their status as familiar but not quite, they invoke an unsettling nostalgia, a funhouse mirror that recalls without replicating. Tumbled together in piles or scattered as though dropped, we see them on barren stairways, rocks at the waterside, dirt roads.
The locations themselves aren't readable to me at first glance—inscrutable and impersonal, they could be anywhere in the United States. Upon reading the didactic text, though, I learn that the photographs are staged at sites like Santa Anita Park, Manzanar, and Angel Island, all of which were zones of persecution of Japanese Americans during World War II. Santa Anita Park served as the largest incarceration camp of Japanese Americans in California, forcibly holding more than 18,000 people at its peak occupancy. Manzanar was another such camp, holding adults and children in paper-covered pine barracks. Angel Island was the main immigration hub between Asia and the United States. When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 went into effect, it was a key site that turned away more than two-thirds of immigrants from Asian countries. Like Santa Anita Park, the island also served as a "holding site," where 800 Japanese immigrants were arrested and sent for relocation after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Now the photographs become legible. They trace the history of Japanese and Japanese-American people in the United States, evoking not only a fraught past of repression and oppression at the hands of the government but also the lack of memorialization for what they endured. The stuffed animals that mark the frames are a ghostly reminder of the people who were here and who are no longer with us. Other photographs explore Japanese restaurants and photo studios that remain to this day in Los Angeles, making clear the connection between the past and the present, as well as the outsized cultural influence of the Japanese in the United States.
Having circled the first room, I'm shuttled through a taut makeshift hallway, constructed via a large cardboard wall imitating a city building. Cutouts in the cardboard, too high up to reach, imitate cut-glass windows. I feel like I'm in a dollhouse, one still yet to be constructed. I've bought the parts to assemble, and they've arrived in an Amazon cardboard box. But I'm the one who's shrunk.
Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga, installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–August 4, 2024. Photography by Sarah Golonka.
Rounding the corner, my sense of scale is thrown off again as a dozen round tables dot the space. Now I'm large again, and the tables are small, each one flaunting an abstract ceramic piece. The printed toys in the photos are replaced by architectural sculptures with sinuous lines. Clothes by CFGNY drape across the tables, in leopard prints and baby blue tulles. Texture is everywhere, even, I notice, on the undersides of the ceramics where delicate lace patterns are printed into the glaze.
After weaving through each table setting, I am released into yet another cavernous room, this one populated with a very different sort of sculpture. These are made of fabric and hanging from clothing racks. I have entered Tominaga's space, where clothes are displayed not as separates combined into outfits, but as entire entities in and of themselves—skirts and pants are stitched together; one-pieces and jumpsuits self-contain. Although they are bodiless, they recall the body all the more for its absence, evoking an invisible being in the clothing. One who could be anyone, any gender, anywhere.
Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga, installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–August 4, 2024. Photography by Sarah Golonka.
The clothes tend toward the baggy, without being shapeless. Jackets and pants are done up in large basting stitches, and hems are left raw, creating an unfinished feel that belies no sense of sloppiness—the functional seams are clean and well-sewn. It's as though Tominaga wants to draw our attention to the made quality of these garments. This process of making is brought to the fore in our contemplation of them; we can imagine the threaded needle, the looped knit. The textures, too, force consideration. Pleats of fabric pucker, scrunch, loosen, release. They build volume in the fabrics of florals and checkers. Tartans and paisleys are combined haphazardly yet artfully.
None of the clothing slot neatly into male or female dress. Neither are they precisely unisex, in the sense of the neutral palettes and androgynous silhouettes that are usually associated with it. These clothes are brash and outspoken, borrowing as much from menswear as womenswear; there's the sharp tailoring of a suit with the pink frills of a prom dress. We are kept guessing, and the clothes happily shake their heads, refusing to be categorized.
Wataru Tominaga, Untitled (Red Pleated Vest, Pink Corduroy Pants, Black Sweater with Pleated Sleeves), 2015. Cotton, textile vinyl. 51 3/16 × 23 5/8 × 3 15/16 in. (130 × 60 × 10 cm) overall. Lookbook, 31st Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography, April 21–25, 2016, Villa Noailles, Hyères, France. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Wataru Tominaga.
Tominaga is not content to settle for conventional fabric and notions. Netting forms sleeves. Thin neon ropes become embroidery, recalling Western shirt motifs. Electrical tape adorns bell bottoms, fanning into vertical striping. While not shying away from such decorative elements, the clothes remain stubbornly utilitarian. They may not be something seen on the streets every day, but they look ready to be taken down, unzipped, stepped into, and walked out in. They are bodies without bodies. Bodies for anybody.
Sculptures as they are, they still boast their readiness to be worn via ample pockets and hoods. Some pieces are multipurpose with surprising new configurations of the workaday anorak or dungaree that we associate with much less fanciful workwear. Borrowing equally from traditional kimono, Harajuku subcultures, and classic Americana, Tominaga plays with the idea of a singular "Japanese" style as much as gendered clothing for men or women.
It is this ongoing effort of reconsideration, this doing and doing over of ideas and histories, that binds the works of Tominaga and CFGNY in a loosely knotted bow. Both are deeply concerned with how the past informs the present, in design and in the way the Asian diaspora is represented then and now.
I follow through the crowd of clothing, the ghostly brightly colored bodies that are Tominaga's designs. Meandering between the racks, I feel like I'm intruding on a very chic, quiet party where each guest has a purpose and a secret. I find myself nodding to them, slowing my pace. After what feels like ages, I am let out into the final room. Smaller than any of those preceding it, the space seems to erupt toward me in colors and dance. The walls are plastered in photographic murals of people wearing Tominaga's clothing, and I see now that they weren't ghosts at all. They were just waiting.
Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga is on view at the Hammer Museum through August 4, 2024.
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