The Brooklyn Rail

Since 2015, Shanzhai Lyric—the moniker for the collaborative duo Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky—has collected knockoff wearables, often Chinese-made, that garble and remix English text. Rather than understanding these linguistic fragments as broken language, Lin and Tatarsky frame them as pseudo-poetic forms, merely another stage in the English language’s eternal evolution and itineraries. Displacing the authorial expressionism of lyric poetry, these abstract inscriptions are the byproducts of globalized circuits of commerce, the uncanny result of iterative acts of mimicry, theft, and (mis)translation. Shanzhai Lyric’s research is collected in a web-based database and an extensive Instagram trove of shirts; as Lin and Tatarsky have written in their newly released publication, “An infinite scroll. An endless garment.” Their archive of more than five hundred counterfeit T-shirts has also materialized in sprawling installations and poetry-style readings from crumpled masses of clothing at arts organizations from Brooklyn to Vienna and Leeds.

Endless Garment is the first publication to index a portion of this textual-textile accumulation, drawing from collected shirts, photographs submitted by friends and followers, and errata encountered in markets from Beijing and Barcelona to Panama City and Sunset Park. Though the book’s cover discloses a messy assemblage of clothing, scattered clauses from which are recognizable on the pages within, the interior is printed imageless with black text on white pages, rendering the amassed apparel into one, long-form stream of babble. The book’s table of contents outlines distinct thematic sections—including “Empire,” “Fashion,” and “Love”—but there's a wryness to the words and phrases that fall under a given header: one page in the “Femalie” section (a strange portmanteau that might rhyme both with “female” and “family”) reads, “WE SHOUL ALL B FEMENIS / BEIBI.” Section markers are absent in the book itself, as if to suggest the looseness of these imposed, conceptual armatures. Instead, the texts ramble associatively through spare pages of concrete accumulations that highlight vague connections between blocks of texts.

In this nonsensical barrage, the reader’s attention turns to the forms and patterns of words and sentences. Phrases cut out before their conclusion. Repetition becomes a disintegrative logic: “GUCCI” becomes “CUGGI” and then “C U C C U G U.” As in a bad OCR scan, errors arise from visual parallelism: “GHANEL COCO” and “CHRISTIAN DIOP.” The currency of brand names runs throughout, the interlinked letters of couturier acronyms turned into prompts for further wordplay: “Love Vacation / Louis Vuitton / Losiu Vuitotn / LUOIS VUTITON FOREVER / LVUTN.” Sometimes, the spelling is perfect and the logic sound, yet the quip doesn’t quite land: “I WAS ASHAMED OF MYSELF WHEN I REALIZED LIFE WAS A COSTUME PARTY, AND I ATTENDED WITH MY REAL FACE.” In the tradition of slogan tees—intended as one-liners, arresting yet glib—the untrammeled spill of language strikes a frenetically cheery note.

In the simple act of transcribing text from its fabric substrate, Endless Garment presents a palpably different experience from that encoded in Shanzhai Lyric’s archive, exhibitions, or readings. Printed onto clothing, the texts suggest a potential wearer’s rapport with motivational phrases or statements of identity. Each shirt implies its own voice: “BE Yourself BECAUS AN ORIGINAL is worth MORE than a COPY.” The reader wonders whether the shirt speaks to or for them—whether they might inhabit its persona as their own.

The tension between embodied and book-bound language was teased during the March 2026 book launch for Endless Garment, which took place at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The event fused fashion show and poetry reading; as one of thirty models styling counterfeit shirts, I hastily donned an ill-fitting pink slogan tee that read, in lowercase serif font, “wellcome to the”; from the back, one could read, “idiot world,” white-on-pink. Stepping from behind a curtain, I walked toward and circumnavigated a raised platform, following other tee-clad figures who had walked before me; other models waited for their cues from behind the curtain. As I walked, I heard poet Robert Fitterman rasp through disjunct phrases from a small Post-it-plastered copy of Endless Garment. The text on my shirt and those of the other models subtitled and punctuated the words sizzling down from the PA system overhead: “One less Freedom for us today, then one less Freedom for someone els e tomorrow / wellcome to the / idiot world.” The single, persistent consciousness implied by Fitterman’s reading voice was contradicted by the continuous succession of models, underlining how Endless Garment folds many into one.

On the page, the text’s found origins are obscured, the collection of shirts coalescing into one communal, commercial unconscious. In its own (albeit schizoid) voice, this nameless narrator delivers a deteriorative monologue that rivals the most textbook examples of literary nonsense and unoriginal genius. The first person proliferates: “want to feel i want to run i want to on my free i want to tear down the! that i told me inside.” Direct address and imperative moods are suggested by phrases like “wake up” or “come on lively girl.” What was authorless and without identity—the emergent voice of logistics—has, in Endless Garment, taken on a life of its own. As the book draws to a close, the mood turns melancholic, as if this discarnate voice recognizes its own end in the cessation of language: “Nothing to add / Mortality / A Bench / Nonsense / The story of my life.”