FAC XTRA RETREAT (FXR) is composed of members Ei Arakawa-Nash, Patty Chang, Pearl C. Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anna Sew Hoy, Shirley Tse, and Amy Yao. All are artists who teach in various art schools and universities. In 2022, they connected in the context of the Asian American Pacific Islander Arts Network (AAPIAN), a group of artists and art workers based in California. Eventually, they formalized as FXR (Fac Xtra Retreat) and presented a performance of the same name at REDCAT, Los Angeles, in 2023.

Ei Arakawa-Nash is a Japan-born American performance artist based in Los Angeles, teaching at ArtCenter College of Design. Arakawa’s performances are often created through fervent collaborations with artists (and at times their artworks) and audience members themselves. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (Fribourg, 2023), Tate Modern (London, 2021), and Artists Space (New York, 2021), among others. Group exhibitions have taken place at Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile［CHAT］ (Hong Kong, 2024), Musée d’ Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg, 2021), Honolulu Biennial (2019), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), Berlin Biennale (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Whitney Biennial (New York, 2014), among others. Arakawa-Nash’s works are held in a number of major collections, including the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Porto), and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej (Warsaw), among others.

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles area based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation, and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Learning Endings, her collaboration with Astrida and Aleksija Neimanis, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project that surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. Stray Dog Hydrophobia, her most recent project with David Kelley, explores deepsea mining and the entangled histories of extraction from the sea rooted in British colonialism in Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica—where the British brought enslaved Africans to cultivate sugar, cocoa, and chocolate—is now home to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N. global body charged with regulating deep-sea mining. Stray Dog Hydrophobia is not only about deep-sea mining and marine life, but also about the layered violence of colonial histories and the extractive systems that endure. In addition to numerous awards and fellowships, her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.

Pearl C. Hsiung (b. Taichung, Taiwan) lives and works in Los Angeles. Hsiung’s painting, video, and installations summon landscapes to question human-nature dualisms and explore the speculative space of our physical, energetic, and temporal entanglement. She has exhibited in solos at Visitor Welcome Center, Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, and Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles and abroad at Max Wigram Gallery, London and Upriver Gallery, Kunming, China and in group shows at North Carolina Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; The Centre National d’art Contemporain, Villa Arson, Nice; Museum of Modern Art, Busan South Korea; and Royal Academy of Arts, London. Hsiung received a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts, Getty Fellow, Mid-Career Artist grant (2015) and has been an artist in residence in the National Park Services Santa Monica Mountains and Whiskeytown National Recreation Area; P3 Studio, Cosmopolitan Hotel, Las Vegas; and Red Mansion Art Prize Residency, Kunming. Her LA Metro tile-mosaic mural “High Prismatic” is on view at the Grand Ave Arts/Bunker Hill station in downtown Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University Long Beach.

Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and a Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. Her artistic activity is a form of experimental archival research, driven by impulses to both commemorate and objectively analyze life's intimacies. She reconfigures the complex collateral of time into alternative archives, monuments, and discursive tableaux, activating sites of presentation and public space with performative and monumental gestures. She has exhibited internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center, the Bonner Kunstverein, The Vleshaal Contemporary Art Center and Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway. Recently, she was included in Crack Up Crack Down, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts curated by Slavs and Tatars, and has presented commissioned public works at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, City Hall Park, New York City, the Parcours Sector of Art Basel Switzerland, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2025, the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, (Middelburg, Netherlands) will publish a twelve-year career monograph of Ross-Ho's work. Her work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art in America, Flash Art, Art + Auction, and Frieze among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Anna Sew Hoy is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Sew Hoy utilizes sculpture, ceramics, public art and performance to connect with our environment, and to demonstrate the power found in the fleeting and handmade. Her work has been at the forefront of a re-engagement with clay in contemporary art, and is identified with a critical rethinking of the relationship between art and craft. Solo presentations of Sew Hoy’s work have been mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Aspen Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Orange County Museum of Art. Sew Hoy received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Visual Art in 2022, as well as a Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2023. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for Visual Art to support Psychic Body Grotto, her largest public sculpture to date. She has also received the California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists, the United States Artists Broad Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She is a Professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

Shirley Tse (born in Hong Kong) lives and works in California. She has created sculptural interventions that interrogate notions of place, politics, and ecology. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally at venues including the Biennale of Sydney, MoMA PS1, and SFMOMA. At the 58th Venice Biennale, Tse was the first female artist to represent Hong Kong in a solo exhibition. Her works are in the permanent collections of M+, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, New Museum, New York, Vancouver Art Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009), City of Los Angeles Individual Artists Fellowship (2009), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists Mid-Career Award (2012), International Sculpture Center Outstanding Educator Award (2023), Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2024). Tse has been on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001, where she held the Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art from 2018 to 2021.

Amy Yao lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She received a BFA with Honors from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 1999 and a MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2007. She has had solo exhibitions at The Power Station, Dallas, Texas (2023); NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York (2019); 47 Canal, New York (2017); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2016); and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2011). Her work has been exhibited at ICA LA (2024); Slought Gallery, Philadelphia (2022); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson (2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2014); White Columns, New York (2014); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); He Xiang Art Museum, Shenzhen (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2013). In 2012, she received the Creative Capital Grant, and in 2011 the Printed Matter Artists Award. She has also been the recipient of the CUNY-PSC Professional Development Grant in 2009, and the Susan H. Whedon Award from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, in 2007. She was a member of Emily’s Sassy Lime, a punk rock group from Southern California.