...is a collaborative architecture and design studio dedicated to things, both material and intangible. Our work reflects a conviction that architecture lies at the intersection of many fields and disciplines.
About
Installations
Dwelling
Commercial
Things!
Press + Awards
Counterfeit Museum
Project Team: Can Vu Bui and Lane Rick
Welcome to the Counterfeit Museum, a real Monument to the Fake.
Naturally, it is hidden in New York City’s Chinatown, the cultural
epicenter of fake handbags, perfumes, and watches. It is around the
corner from “authentic” Sichuan restaurants, and indistinguishable from
the shops around it, displaying the same merchandise, but for a
different reason.
Museums, like stores, are repositories of things, accumulated and
valued for a number of reasons, generally financial, cultural, or
historical. And, as with so many valuable artifacts, copies, fakes,
replicas, and counterfeits flow through underground markets. If art
collectors navigate through (and sometimes toward) fake paintings,
coins, or Mayan pottery, then fashionistas engage in a similar exchange
with the knock-off Coach bags, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and Rolex watches.
All
too often the ‘value’ of the fake is dismissed as a lower quality good,
worthless to the earnest collector. With the tell-tale single stitch
seam, misaligned logo, or cheap clasp, the fake is often overlooked, or
perhaps forgotten by fastidious collectors of international culture and
style. But this dismissal fails to acknowledge the extensive and
very-real networks and infrastructures that support a
multi-billion-dollar industry of counterfeit objects
In 2014 the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seized an estimated $1.2 billion worth of counterfeit goods[i].
Fake markets in Shanghai, hawkers in Italian piazzas, and narrow
Chinatown shops are but the small-scale
operations behind which entire warehouses, shipping containers, and
factories around the world organize and collaborate in a burgeoning
black market.
The Counterfeit Museum is at once party to this operation, but
offers a different face. Embedded within the thriving fake economy of
Chinatown, NY, the museum also displays fake goods as real items. The
hidden network at the back of the museum is also a key to the vast
rhizomatic network of copies and counterfeits that comprise not just an
extensive trading economy, but also a cultural touchstone. For things
are not always as they seem. These fake goods are not for sale; they are
real, and their history is traced to best-guess provenance. Their
display is respectful, like the high end stores and museums they mimic.
It is our hope that by visiting the Counterfeit Museum, the viewer is
able to contemplate the very real byproducts of the fake economy.
[i] "CBP, ICE HSI Report $1.2 Billion in Counterfeit Seizures in 2014." U.S. Customs and Border Protection