The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin
Serena Chang, Chang Yuchen, CFGNY, Huang Po-Chih, Shanzhai Lyric
The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin is an ongoing transnational exhibition project that studies the ways in which Asian fashion production is represented. Curated by Jeppe Ugelvig and featuring work by Serena Chang, Chang Yuchen, CFGNY, Huang Po-Chih, and Shanzhai Lyric, this presentation builds on a prior exhibition at Beijing’s X Museum in 2021, and the special issue of the journal Viscose from the same year. While earlier iterations used the South China Sea as a conceptual starting point, Atlantic Basin responds to the specificity of New York City—particularly Red Hook, once a major entry point for goods shipped to the United States, and a site that remains deeply connected to the Asian and global textile trade.
Spanning the second and third floors of Pioneer Works, The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin begins with three bodies of work that each examine the labor of garment workers, both in Taiwan and America. Inspired by the obsolescence of Taiwan’s textile industry that followed the outsourcing of fashion production to Shenzhen, Huang Po-Chih’s Production Line – Made in China & Made in Taiwan (2014–2020) situates a row of homogenous, blue denim shirts besides photographs of the young women—including his own mother—who once manufactured them. These works are presented alongside a sprawling archive of handmade garments, ephemera, and video documentation by U.S.-based Chinese artist Chang Yuchen, who began producing work under the moniker Use Value in 2016.
In the decade since, Use Value priced its commodities in accordance with the value of the artist’s time, which fluctuated as Yuchen drifted from various labor markets ranging from the service industry to academia. Use Value’s archive, presented as an incomplete retrospective, is ensconced in clusters of totem-like sculptures and wall-based collages by Serena Chang. Mimicking the forms of sugar cane stalks, Chang’s sculptures repurposed hosiery manufactured by Sheerly Touch-Ya, a company that the artist’s parents founded upon emigration from Taiwan to the United States. Memories of the family’s assimilation echo throughout her collages, which embed videos of manufacturing machinery within complex armatures.
Artist collective CFGNY transforms the third floor gallery into a cardboard-lined container—a reference to the ubiquitous material that serves as a skin for commodities shipped around the world—that houses a new series of photographs recently shot in Ho Chi Minh City. Captured at full-service studios offering everything from photography to makeup and lighting, the images spotlight the young entrepreneurs and influencers cultivating new visions for Vietnam’s garment production infrastructure.
These artworks are accompanied by a constellation of mannequins donning garments by designers who have contested the stereotypes of Asian fashion in their work. From legends to young diasporic New York fashion designers, these designers both perpetuate, and complicate, notions of heritage as style, exploring more complex histories of commodities and bodies in flux.
The Endless Garment—a phrase originally coined by Roland Barthes in his book The Fashion System (1967)—borrows its title from an ongoing project by Shanzhai Lyric, the self-described “poetic research unit” comprising artist-archivists Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky. Over the past decade, the duo has accumulated hundreds of shanzhai T-shirts—Chinese-made counterfeits that imitate global brands and are peddled in markets across various Asian metropolises as well as New York City. At Pioneer Works, a selection of these garments is displayed, while the artists transform one of the institution’s artist-in-residency studios into a presentation space for their archive of research materials.
The exhibition is notably accompanied by a new, titular book by Shanzhai Lyric, which is composed of the shirts’ slogans, aphorisms, and mistranslations as a single poem. Published by Pioneer Works Press, the book marks a decade of the artists’ archival project while capturing the lyricism of both fast fashion and global clothing culture. As a whole, The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin contests the potential of fashion as a container for imagining community, identity, heritage, and history in both a local and transnational sense.