02/19/2026
Amant presents a new commission by CFGNY: Puddles into Pond
Curated by Tobi Maier & Ian Wallace
Opening reception, March 19th
6-9 PM .arts
315 Maujer St. Brooklyn, NY
Puddles into Pond takes its conceptual point of departure from the No Name Painting Association (无名画会 Wuming Huahui), an amorphous group of self-taught artists active in Beijing between 1973 and 1981. Working during the Cultural Revolution, in a political climate where art was expected to conform to Socialist Realist depictions of revolutionary subjects, Wuming met covertly in the suburbs and outskirts of Beijing to practice landscape painting en plein air. Their practice represented not only an aesthetic refusal, but a subversive reconfiguration of collectivity away from the centralized planning of institutional sanction.
At Amant, CFGNY pays homage to and builds on this legacy as a framework for thinking about collective practice under conditions of constraint. The collective has constructed an artificial landscape traversed by a bridge clad in stuffed animal fur. This environment is ornamented with dish-like ceramic tiles produced by thirteen invited friends, peers, and long-standing collaborators. Mounted together on a shared armature, these vessels together suggest an abstracted pond, each functioning as an individual receptacle that contributes to a larger, composite surface. The gatherings, conversations, and shared labor that produced the tiles are an integral component of the resulting sculpture itself; in this way, the installation extends CFGNY’s ongoing interest in collective production, echoing the Wuming group’s creation of landscapes as a quietly radical communal act. radical communal act.
In the rear gallery five water clocks, powered by a central water source and electric pumps, mark different temporal rhythms operating alongside and against standardized clock time. Rather than measuring productivity or efficiency, these clocks suggest durational experiences shaped by maintenance, circulation, and dependency—modes of being together that resist capitalist quantification.
