The Fabulousness of Fakes

An essay response to Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang’s “Vanity Show: Perhaps…” at Veronica project space

By Minh Nguyen

Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang, Three-Ring Bag (2019: metal rings, Coach strap, drawstring sachet, Prada replica label. Pink & Blue Diamond Card Bag (2019): metal chain, Coach Outlet labels (bullet-target stamps), rhinestone earrings, hair clip.

There’s a mall called Saigon Square that summons shoppers worldwide for its premium counterfeits. Sweaty travelers squeeze into booths to flip through bizarro Comme des Garçons, with red-heart-with-eyes logos that would wink if they could. All shopping trains the eyes, and fakes-scouting trains detectives, fabric experts, brand historians. Someone sticks a hand inside of a The North Face backpack, assesses that the real mesh is not as thick. Another gives a verdict on a Patagonia jacket: “the tag says Gore-Tex but that style doesn’t come in Gore-Tex.” There are always the expected copies (the Nikes and Louis Vuittons), but what’s most puzzling about this place are the eccentricities that emerge, like dregs from the murky expanse of global commerce. One of this year’s ultra-niche arrivals was apparel from the golf brand Titleist. Such garments, for lifestyles alien to the city of Saigon itself, stoke big questions. How did they get here? Who escorted them? What golfing in the tropics? 

For “Vanity Show: Perhaps…” at Veronica project space, Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang sourced materials from thrift, outlet, and online stores, friends and relatives, and sewed purses. These purses have sentient charm, like a black strap wristlet on which a replica Prada labeled pouch perches, as if riding a swing. Some have elements of real designer, like a pink Coach sleeve wallet that fits one credit card, affixed to a metal ball chain. The project space is transformed into a boutique, in the chrome, grey, and white palette of mall swankiness. In a lit-up mirrored wardrobe, the purses dangle off hangers; on a marble vitrine, they’re splayed out like heirlooms. Three-digit and four-digit numbers on the price tags. The purses exude luxury in the commercial sense, of having never known hard labor, or having never had to carry too much, in the mind or on the shoulders. 

By placing these fused crafted objects in the gallery, Liang and Fang pose that fakes are art, and that those who make fakes are artists too. At Saigon Square, I have wondered the same of those fakes and their makers, who were likely factory workers from China, or South or Southeast Asia. (Even when it’s not “Made in Asia” it’s Made by Asians, like the Chinese workers who assemble designer bags with “Made in Italy” labels in Tuscany’s industrial zones.) By standard assessments these makers aren’t deemed artists because we don’t know them — don’t have a name for a profile feature, don’t have a lifetime to which an oeuvre may be ascribed. Not only anonymous but unoriginal, the opposite of art, a faceless Asian mass who only know how to copy, by law or outside it.  

Counterfeits are denounced for tarnishing brand integrity and disgracing copyright laws; they are decried for upholding sweatshop conditions, as if “legitimate” companies don’t depend on the same exploitative models. But despite how widely it’s maligned, the fake is inevitable from the original, entwined like its shadow. Professor Ackbar Abbas writes that the fake is best understood not as a villain but a symptom of the global division of labor: luxury brand items can be imagined as a split between a Designed Good and a Manufactured Good, where the former often occurs in a “developed” country and the latter in a “developing” one. Take Nike, offers Abbas, as a company that has only design and research units in the United States, and bases its production abroad.

As much as 80% of counterfeits come from China, some even manufactured in the same factories as the original. So if fakes evince the unequal relations that globalization has engendered, could these illicit replications also be conceived as acts of rebellion from the manufactured side?

Installation view of “Vanity Show: Perhaps…” at Veronica project space. Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang, Two-Finger Bag (2019): Juicy Couture strap, metal mesh, Coach label, Michael Kors label.

Fakes do, in fact, require inventiveness, like ‘excess order’ (yuandan) or ‘of the same blood’ fakes made in local factories using leftovers from an initial order. Say Nike factory workers were given fifty-five yards of taffeta to cut thirty tennis skirts, with some fabric allowance for flaws. The more precisely a worker cuts the fabric, the more material she’ll have. The skills learned to make fakes are linked to the broader general intellect of workers, who have learned to outstretch time as well as material. In Shengze Zhu’s documentary Present. Perfect. (2018), a collage film of found footage of Chinese livestreamers, there is a woman who broadcasts her workday at an underwear factory for tips. As she looks into the camera and chats with her viewers, she expediently zips fabric through the sewing machine. Her swiftness expands her labor like an accordion. A viewer remarks on her precision with awe. She laughs, telling us that she vlogs when the boss is away. 

Factory workers create shoes and blouses from time and materials, and even more time and more materials out of what they were given. And they also create when they’re not making; not sewing the lining of other people’s pockets, not taking any more from management. Liang and Fang’s purses — all purses, real or fake — not only hold the conditions of their making but resistance to those conditions, when their makers were commiserating behind buildings, comparing wages, planning strikes and scribing those plans in lockers. These purses hold the reflections of a striker in “Nhật Ký Tập Thể Của Công Nhân” (Collective Diary of Workers) in 1971, after an embattled strike period: “Capital is still capital; the state is still the state. But we women workers have found our love for each other stronger than ever.” They hold the story of the workers from the northern provinces of the Economic Processing Zone in Linh Trung who infiltrated the area with the spirit of strike-readiness, to the point where management feared the whole town. And they hold the instance in 2019 when 50,000 garment workers in Bangladesh engaged in militant work stoppages, causing over fifty factories to shut down. 

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The problem with the fake is not how close the fake is to the original, but how close the original is to the fake. Once at Saigon Square, a friend and I fawned over a facsimile of a Balenciaga Triple S sneaker. Flaunted on a shelf under an authenticating spotlight, it looked convincing: the red, beige, and navy colorway, the swollen shoe tongue, the splashwave patterns like scraped cake icing on the grotesquely large rubber soles. For what you’d call in Chinese ‘fakes of quality’ (jiamao bueweilie, as opposed to jiamao weilie, or ‘shoddy fakes’), they were selling at the before-barter-price of $90 USD. It was a fraction of the cost of the $850 Triple S, which while bearing the visual traits, was in fact, not even a running shoe. Jog and risk rolling an ankle dragging the shoe’s weight, for they were not built to support exercise. Layers of soles for the appearance of performance. The Saigon Square shoe stripped the branding spell and made the choice stark: a $90 fake sneaker or a $850 fake sneaker?

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Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang, Are You The Man For Me? (2019). Artist Kalina Chung modeling Hongzhe Liang and Jueqian Fang’s Monogram Cousin Bag (2019) 

Liang and Fang made these purses for their mothers and mothers’ friends, who are part of a group the media has termed “Chinese luxury shoppers.” Over the past decades, Chinese consumers have steadily risen in and now dominate the luxury goods market. This is an inversion to the dynamic of China as always producing but never consuming (the irony of products labelled “Made in China” but not made available for sale in China itself.) In the words of fashion scholar Thuy Linh Tu, “once the world’s factory, China is now poised to be the world’s mall.” 

The remark reminds me that last year, Saigon got its first Uniqlo store — a late début considering Uniqlo’s factories have been in Vietnam for years. Shoppers queued up at 4 a.m. on opening day, eager to score the ‘Asian-style’ elevated basics. Founder Tadashi Yanai greeted the crowd. It is exciting, Yanai proclaimed, that as the most important production base of the company, Vietnam can now potentially be one of its largest markets. Once the brand’s workers, now the brand’s shoppers! It was like the garments flew out of the factories, encircled the globe, then cascaded down to where they started. The garments had seen the sights and now they were coming back.

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Some argue that the arrangement between “head nations” which design products, and “body nations” which manufacture them, is indeed productive for both: political economist Richard Rosecrance asserts that “body nations rapidly develop new ganglia that in time create heads of their own.” While this notion only excuses existing exploitative relations, the metaphor of mutant cell growth is enchanting. 

I imagine that these excrescences are not copies but instead the wildly inventive knockoffs like Liang and Fang’s purses: A rainbow canvas Coach bag with a white fur trim, sewn to two belts with fake Hermès hardware clasps. A metallic mesh sack on which both a Coach and Michael Kors label are tacked. They’re like shanzhai, a term for fakes that don’t aspire to replicate but are in a universe of their own. Journalist Xiaowei Wang writes that “it’s what Chinese piracy looks like when you’ve become so advanced that you don’t have anything left to steal.” These new ganglia items have taken the semiotic power of the original and darted away. They’re fabulous! in the dual sense of the word, as both glamorous and completely invented.