Before Burnout, 2026
Can a shell burned in fire through the night return to what it was before?
Can a fractured body ever be restored to what it once was?
Before Burnout (2026) draws attention to sound, scent, and taste as ways of slowing down and returning to the body. Through a sensory-led performance and its materialized relics, FU CONG LE 付丛乐 and Ni Daodao 倪島島 unsettle the linear movement from burnout toward recovery.
Revisiting the attentive listening to everyday sounds associated with an earlier wave of ASMR and meditation practices, the performance brings together sensory experiences and live reading to create a temporary space for rest, care, and attention. The accompanying work gathers elements made for the performance but presented before it: an after appears before its before. This work does not stage a state of after burnout; rather, it asks what might have existed before burnout, and whether it can ever be reached.
Ni Daodao 倪島島 is an artist whose practice moves across natural lacquer, stitching, fermentation, planting and cultivation, beekeeping, installation and performance. Their work explores care, migration, ecological relationships and the entanglement of human and more-than-human lives. Through repetitive processes of planting, cultivation, repair, maintenance and material transformation, Daodao works with living, discarded and existing materials rather than producing new objects. Their recent practice understands ecology not simply as a subject, but as a way of working: maintaining the world through everyday gestures of care, extending the lives of materials, and allowing them to enter new social and ecological relationships.
FU CONG LE 付丛乐 is a PhD researcher in contemporary art and film, focusing on intersectional politics, diasporic visuality, and racialized aesthetics.
