For Cover Street Market, CFGNY will be presenting a store alongside a series of events that the duo has asked their community of friends to collaborate on. By inviting others to participate in the project, they look to expand the dialogue that was the initial spark of the project.
Dec 14 — 7-9 pm
The Shanzhai Lyric: “YILIAN IN NEW YORK”
A poetry-lecture by Display Distribute w. Ming Lin & Alexandra Tatarsky
The Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The starting point for this inquiry is the glossolalic and supra-sensical text that often appears on counterfeit (shanzhai) clothing. These phrases can be read as evidence of illicit yet empowering projects that generate new forms of agency among unlikely collaborators. Exploring and distorting the language of branding, shanzhai language collapses the real and the ideal in a lateral logic which destabilizes global hierarchies. In this way, shanzhai language might be included in post-colonial discourse surrounding the strategic use of language as a mode of resistance, as a subversion and reappropriation of American cultural imperialism. How we might carve out a deterritorialized space by rewriting the grammar of consumerism?
Inferiority Complex
A lecture performance by Sung Tieu
Inferiority complex, a state in which one persistently doubts one's own self worth. It is thought to drive afflicted individuals to either overcompensate, resulting in a ravenous drive for perfection and over achievement, or a dull sense of inadequacy and helplessness. Tieu’s performance investigates the relationship we might have with our selves and our culture as something that is based on the socially familiar as well as the identity of the other; observing the bastardised and despotically twisted ways we flagrantly experience cultural hierarchies and marginalization in the art world, while at the same time practicing forms of resistance from within it.
Polyphyletic Double: On Kidnapping, Murder, and Diaspora
A reading by Sarah Wang
An essay about trauma and memory, exploring Taiwan’s shoe industry, milk and capitalist commodity production, and the scrim of Hollywood while growing up in Los Angeles.
Dec 16 — 12-6 pm on the hour
Ying Liu will lead a guided exploration of and around the CFGNY flagship store. Would you like to learn and touch a material that's also called "snake skin" in China? All walk ins are welcome, no RSVP necessary!
