CFGNY

It is rumored that Nam June Paik made the first video art piece in New York with a newly bought Sony Portapak. He had filmed Pope Paul VI from the back of a cab and later that day screened the footage in a bar in Greenwich Village, inaugurating a flurry of energy with artists experimenting with the new medium. With our new performance "CFG-20260717," we explore how the development and circulation of emerging video technologies from Asia, specifically the Sony Portapak in Japan, the first one-person operated, self-contained video camera and playback unit introduced in 1967, enabled the artistic pursuits that sustained The Kitchen’s founding in 1971. This is the history of the emergence of video art in New York City; a period of creative experimentation that marked a shift in the physical and emotional relationship between the body, the gaze, the screen, and the archival record, concurrent to the artist communities that grew out of the medium’s accessibility.

2023

BTS of shooting our work for Refashioning at the Hammer Museum with Alan Miyatake. Alan heads the photo studio that his grandfather Toyo Miyatake founded in 1923, which has continuously produced portraiture of people in SoCal for now over 100 years. He was very hard to convince to collaborate with, but eventually came around I think in part because his daughter likes stuffed animals. We are immensely grateful that he decided to work with us. He said it was one of the easiest shoots he’s ever done because the subjects didn’t move around, blink, or get tired. We hoped that at the exhibition’s opening, we’d be able to give him a tour so he could see the project in full and understand why we wanted to specifically work with his studio to shoot portraits of our sculptures, but he was away on a fishing trip.