Pioneer Works Presents The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin
NEW YORK, NY, DECEMBER 10, 2025—Pioneer Works is pleased to present The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin, 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 she 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 the 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 composes 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.
The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin is curated by Jeppe Ugelvig, and made possible with support from the Taipei Cultural Center in New York, Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan). It is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
About the Artists
Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner, exploring writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (through an ongoing project called Use Value), and publishing in the way of a dandelion spreading its seeds. She was a recipient of New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellowship, Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award, Luminarts Fellowship, etc. The artist has shown and performed work at Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Beijing Commune (Beijing), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Amant (New York), Artists Space (New York), UCCA Dune (Beidaihe), Para Site, and Tai Kwun (both Hong Kong). Chang has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, and Randian.
CFGNY is an artist collective whose research-based practice takes the form of image making, installation, sculpture, and performance to expand ideas of racialization and subjectivity. Founded in 2016, the collective continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian,” an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. Recent exhibitions, performances, and projects have been presented by Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, SculptureCenter, Japan Society (all New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), X Museum (Beijing), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). In October 2024, CFGNY was named Frieze London’s Focus Stand Prize winner for its presentation with Hot Wheels, Athens, and London. CFGNY is composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen.
Serena Chang studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Currently based in New York City, she had a solo exhibition at Island Gallery (New York), and has exhibited at Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (Fall River), Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội), Art in General (New York), and Bonnington Center (London). Chang has given talks at Parsons School of Design and Bennington College, and was a recipient of the SMFA Traveling Fellowship. She co-founded Shisanwu LLC, a materials research and production facility in Queens, NY, and Lunch Hour, an artist/curator collective exploring and critiquing mythologies around authorship, work, and labor.
In his multi-disciplinary practice, Huang Po-Chih explores the contemporary mechanisms of production and consumption. Adopting the position of a family member, agricultural producer, or entrepreneur, he acts as participant and critic of the socio-economic systems in which he operates. Born in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and based in Taipei, Taiwan, the artist has presented work in major international events, including the 8th Yokohama Triennale (Yokohama), the Busan Biennale (Busan), Performa 19 (New York), the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (Shenzhen), and the Taipei Biennale (Taipei). In addition to group exhibitions around the world, Huang’s institutional solo exhibitions were held at Hayward Gallery HENI Project Space (London), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna), and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taipei).
Shanzhai Lyric, established in 2015, is a roving poetic research unit exploring radical logistics and linguistics through technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. Drawing inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai (counterfeit) T-shirts made in China, they examine how mimicry, hybridity, and permutation reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Incomplete Poem, their roving archive of poetry garments, circulates through poetry-lecture, publication, and installation. In 2020, they founded the fictional office Canal Street Research Association to probe ideas of ownership and property through bootleg as method. Their work has been presented at institutions including MoMA PS1, Abrons Arts Center, Artists Space, Sculpture Center, Storefront for Art & Architecture, and Amant (all New York), Stuart Hall Library and Women’s Art Library (both London), and Times Museum (Guangzhou).
About the Curator
Jeppe Ugelvig is a curator, historian, and cultural critic based in New York City. He is the author of two books: Fashion Work (2020) and Commodity Ecumene (2024). He has taught and lectured at institutions around the world such as Central Saint Martins, FIT, and NYU, and is the founding editor-in-chief of Viscose, a journal for fashion criticism and analysis. He has staged exhibitions in institutions and museums around the world, including the two-part The Endless Garment at X Museum (Beijing), Witch-Hunt at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), and Phantom Plane at Tai Kwun (Hong Kong). He serves as the Moving Image Lab fellow at the Kramlich Collection in Napa Valley.
About Pioneer Works
Pioneer Works (PW) is an artist and scientist-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that fosters innovative thinking through the visual and performing arts, technology, music, and science. PW supports onsite production through its science, design, recording, and ceramics studios; media, virtual environment, and technology labs; darkroom; and garden. Multi-disciplinary programs, exhibitions, residencies and performances are presented to the public, the majority of which are free.
Pioneer Works Press will publish Endless Garment by Shanzhai Lyric in early 2026. At Pioneer Works, publishing is intrinsic to artistic practice and comprises our magazine, Pioneer Works Broadcast, and our imprint, devoted to publishing pathbreaking work in contemporary culture.
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