After Fugue
Commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin for Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024.
Interrogating and transforming the museum’s architecture, After Fugue creates immersive realms that blur the boundaries between individual and societal experience. By interweaving architectural intervention, film, and sound the installation invites contemplation of the intricate layers of temporality and deepness, transforming the museum into a space reminiscent of an archaeological site where fragments of remembrance are unearthed and memories displaced.
Mute
Survey exhibition commissioned by Haus der Kunst, Munich. On view March to April 2024.
Occupying over 18 rooms of Haus der Kunst, Mute invites the audience on a journey that encompasses architectural elements and unregistered spaces, manifesting as an ever-evolving environment. Pan Daijing‘s work is dedicated to process: works from the last ten years are reinterpreted and supplemented by new productions.
The works develop a symbiotic relationship with the spaces in which they unfold. The exhibition created for Haus der Kunst encompasses architectural intervention, sound, video, sculpture, light and choreography rerouting the gaze and opening up unseen spaces.
The durational performances throughout the six weeks of the exhibition aim to distort oppositions, such as the perception of inside and outside, or slow down the velocity of time. There is a sense of continual change, leaving the with a feeling that something profound has happened, even if its form remains unclear.
The exhibition was activated and closed by performances starring Chihiro Araki, Camilla Brogaard, Kelvin Kilonzo, Amie Jammeh, Leah Katz, Chan Wai Lok, Cary Shiu, and Pan Daijing. Daily activations were performed by Amie Jammeh, Chihiro Araki and Wai Lok Chan.
Until Due Time, Everything Is Else
In Until Due Time, Everything Is Else, Pan Daijing crafts an evocative exploration of temporality, memory, and presence. Through an interplay of video, traces of performance, site-specific interventions, and sound, the exhibition delves into the impermanent and fleeting dimensions that shape her understanding of performance — a perception that might parallel existence itself.
Reaching beyond the registers of performance documentation, these works are containers imprinted by transformative moments, and so embody or forecast change. The exhibition directly confronts the paradox of the trace, which suggests that in attempting to capture or preserve an instance, one inadvertently alters or distorts its origins. Traces, whether in memory or art or life, are both revealing and concealing, capturing both past and future whilst simultaneously eluding complete comprehension.
Until Due Time, Everything Is Else is complemented by a publication of the same name, which extends Pan Daijing’s exhibited multi-channel video installation to paper.
Reviewed in Mousse.
Scale Figures
Commissioned by 14th Gwanju Biennale, 2023. On view 7th April – 9th July 2023.
Developing her compositional and spatial research, Pan Daijing has conceived a double architectural intervention for the Gwangju Biennale Hall Bridge and the Octagonal Pavilion located in Jungwoe Park, the two installations acting as the work’s main body and prologue, respectively. An ensemble of loudspeakers at each site brings a composition of opera voices to life. As if rehearsing a daily encounter, Scale Figures serves to rehash the role of infrastructure as at once facilitator and enforcer, connector and barrier, by activating visitors’ encounters with the material premises of these sites through sensory experience.
Echo, Moss and Spill
Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. On view May 2021 – January 2022.
Echo, Moss and Spill centred around six-hour daily durational performances over three weeks, with a two-channel film installation and multiple sound pieces spread across the building. An environment was constructed to instigate and foreground a series of compelling and profound interactions, creating a space for reflection on fear and violence, and an invitation to tenderness. Throughout the exhibition, the choreography resulted in two large drawings on the museum walls, relics of the constantly evolving performance. Echo, Moss and Spill focused on bringing metamorphosis into relief by examining how an environment is impacted by sound over a long period of time. With time suspended, and visual and sonic landscape distorted, the work grows and mutates in unexpected ways, and invites its audience to shed its skin together with it.
Tissues
Commissioned by Tate Modern, London, 2019.
An opera of five acts performed by an ensemble and thirteen singers and dancers, Tissues follows the story of a mythical figure in 13th-century China who escapes her oppressive upbringing by disguising her gender and fleeing from her family. After falling tragically in love with a fellow traveller who refuses her, unable to accept his attraction to another ‘man’, she is trapped in an endless conflict between two divided selves, cultivated from desire and pain under conditions of solitude.
Tissues was a site-specific work illustrated by lights, movement, textile and sound inside the Tate Modern’s subterranean South Tank. Its music, libretto, and choreography were composed, written and directed by Pan, who always performs in her own work. Viewing from within the installation, surrounded by performers, Tissues’ audience watched the opera unfold in a panoramic and everchanging landscape and live environment. Tissues engaged opera as an all-encompassing art form with limiting and liberating conventions, and explored various meanings of extremity, while questioning and pressing the boundaries between music, architecture, performance and visual art. Recordings were not allowed by the audience during the performance.
In 2022 an edit of fragments of Tissues’ music, produced and composed by Pan for four opera voices, was released as a double 12” vinyl, with a selection of artworks from the performance. Listen here.
Avalanche
Short film commissioned by Louvre, Paris for the ‘Regards du Louvre‘ series, 2023.
As though swept away by a gust of wind that must be fought against as one descends, each step down the staircase is a struggle to find one’s feet. The external descent echoes an internal, psychological descent. As though one descended from a superficial state of consciousness towards a deeper one. The external space and the internal space are deformed by the steps of the staircase. These distortions may add strata of experience to the original. At first indecipherable, our first impressions may include a near-infinite infolding of hidden meanings, which become apparent only when we adjust our anamorphic perspective. Like forgotten companions, witnesses of past battles, slabs of past experiences piled atop each other, whose renewed correspondence is the only possible way of recovering what slumbers within. And yet, going beyond comfortable superficiality is disquieting, at first. For it is a letting go of past lightness, towards a more fragile and sickly state. This descent harbours the knowledge of the secrets of another world.
Done Duet
Commissioned by 13th Shanghai Biennale, 2021.
Displayed at Power Station of Art, Shanghai, between April 17th – July 25th, 2021, with an activation performance on April 16th.
Voice (22’45” loop), steel, acid, quartz, polyester, water, video (multi-cam live monitor).
Done Duet recast the silos, a cavity that cuts through three floors, as the spine of Shanghai’s Power Station of Art. It evoked the sensation of undergoing a lumar puncture– the extraction of a vital liquid from deep within the body, pulled through a long thin needle – a procedure that Pan experienced many times over the course of a childhood illness.
Acid-soaked steel and strands of hair hang from the ceiling, eroding and degrading over the course of the three-month installation. Droplets of water fall metronomically from the sky to a desert of quartz, collecting in a pool and turning slowly to amber. A live monitor at the viewers’ feet transmits real-time images from the ceiling to the ground. Cascading layers of opera voices invite the audience into the space, transforming it into a dissonant reverie, underwater or above the sky. Eroded landscapes are punctuated with moments of liveness to encourage an inward listening of the composition and architecture. Its viewers narrativise and shape, through the direction of gaze or duration of their stay, their own experience, entering into a performative entity that continuously feeds back into the work.
水可以将峡谷雕刻成岩石，但是对于个人而言，这种景观变化过于缓慢而无法察觉。《重奏》的衍变不止，参观者不断在它的存在上留下痕迹，从空间里的配角变成主角。他们的行为预示了结尾也启动了一个新的循环，任何元素都可以构成表演环境，任何背景都可以作为创作机体，耳朵与眼睛相扶相佐，给我们的存在赋予了更多诗意的可能。
Uncut
Comissioned by Ghost 2565, Bangkok. Performance on 29th October 2022.
Uncut explores roughness and rawness by experimenting with noise as idea and material, in order for new sensations and energies to emerge. Often creating works within architectural interventions, for Ghost 2565, inspired by the emotional and historical intensity that reverberates underneath the city’s surface, her performance combines sound, movement, and other elements to evoke a haunting sonic, affective, and visual landscape that interacts with Bangkok as a site of contested forces.