Fac Xtra Retreat (FXR) is a collective of seven Los Angeles-based Asian American artists and educators, including Ei Arakawa-Nash, who will represent Japan at the 2026 Venice Biennale. In 24-HOUR CARE, FXR asks what it means to care—for their students, their children, their elders, their community, and for each other—acknowledging care as both extraordinarily rewarding and frequently brutal.
The day’s performances evolve from an “all-nighter” begun the day before during an around-the-clock, corporate-style retreat that hovers between parody and genuine collective process. Borrowing the structure of a professional retreat—an exercise in bonding and productivity that often conceals exhaustion, obligation, and institutional pressure—FXR redirects this format toward something more searching and humane. Through improvised dialogue, sculptural elements, and site-responsive actions, the artists treat the forced language of workplace bonding as an absurd but revealing framework. Moments that might appear casual or offhand gradually open into something more tender and resonant, reflecting on how creative communities function within systems that frequently demand more than they give.
FXR’s members—Ei Arakawa-Nash, Patty Chang, Pearl C. Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao—are practicing artists and professors in MFA programs across California. Their collaboration grew from networks of AAPI artists who came together in recent years amid rising anti-Asian violence and intensified expectations that artists of color serve as cultural representatives within their institutions. Drawing from their lived experiences, FXR’s project reflects the 24-hour nature of care while proposing reciprocal forms of support grounded in real time, real labor, and real relationships.
By reshaping the rituals of professional gathering into a fluid, collective “happening,” FXR gently scrambles the norms of how museums host events, how artists are expected to perform their roles, and how audiences encounter live work. In a moment when social and institutional structures feel increasingly strained, their project lingers in the in-between: where fatigue meets fellowship, absurdity meets truth, and new forms of collective and creative resilience begin to take shape.
As part of Arakawa-Nash’s broader pavilion commission for the Venice Biennale, FXR will continue this project by creating visual elements that blur the architectural lines, shapes, and textures of the Getty Center with the Japan Pavilion, to be presented in Venice in May 2026.
