PSYCHIC BODY RECALIBRATION

Join members of the artist collective FXR (Fac Xtra Retreat) on Mother’s Day for a maintenance ritual of Anna Sew Hoy’s monumental artwork Psychic Body Grotto at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

For this durational performance, Sew Hoy returns to her Psychic Body Grotto, a room-sized bronze sculpture that was commissioned by Los Angeles Nomadic Division in 2017 for the park. Joined by other members of FXR, including Patty Chang, Pearl C. Hsiung, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Shirley Tse, the artists will collectively replenish and recalibrate the sculpture – figuratively, materially, and metaphysically.

Using touch, sound, and psychic-based modalities, the group will restore and ultimately swaddle the sculpture in fabric. The result will recalibrate Psychic Body Grotto to continue serving as a gathering space for the public to enact their own rituals.

This treatment will remain on view through Sunday, May 18, when the group returns, along with FXR member Ei Arakawa-Nash, to complete the healing cycle. The artists, joined by their children and family, will carry the swaddling fabrics used on Psychic Body Grotto to rejuvenate Hsiung’s High Prismatic, a tile-mosaic mural commissioned by LA Metro, located at the Grand Ave Arts/Bunker Hill Station.

FXR (Fac Xtra Retreat) 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. Some are longtime friends and some have met more recently, but most have been aware of each other’s work for a while. In 2022, they connected in the context of the Asian American Pacific Islander Arts Network (AAPIAN), an organic group of artists and art workers based in California. Through these conversations, meetings, and events, they sidebarred around common interests and began gathering as a smaller group on Zoom and in restaurants around Los Angeles to eat food, sometimes drink whiskey, and talk shit about art, life, and teaching. Eventually, they informally 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 an artist, educator, and parent who resolves to spend more time in close attention and teaches at USC Roski School of Art and Design. Chang’s newly commissioned work, Abyssal (2025), recently premiered at the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Reframing of Chinoiserie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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 was in the ’90s punk band Emily’s Sassy Lime and is a contemporary visual artist based in Topanga, California, working in many different mediums informed by ideas of waste, consumption, and identity. Yao is teaching at CalArts.

PSYCHIC BODY RECALIBRATION is presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and organized by Anna Sew Hoy and Christopher Mangum-James, LAND deputy director.

Special thanks to the Los Angeles State Historic Park.