Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
January 16 – July 6, 2025

Sudden Places is Pan Daijing’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition unfolds across a series of works of moving image, sound, sculpture, and painting embedded within an altered landscape. Informed by performance, Sudden Places transforms the architecture of the Burnet Gallery into a dark terrain of shifting scale and breaking thresholds.

At the core is the film work The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2021–2024),  a film built from years of collected encounters across Hong Kong. Scale Figures (2023/25) reappears as a sonic and sculptural composition carried by voice in different parts of the museum. The exhibition also includes two large-scale paintings embedded in the gallery’s architecture, as well as other moving image, photographic, and architectural interventions threaded throughout the space.

Each element in Sudden Places lives within a larger choreography of sound, light, and spatial tension.

 

Walker Art Center Announcement

E-flux Announcement

Commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin for Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024.
June 6 2024 – January 5 2025

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.

Survey exhibition commissioned by Haus der Kunst, Munich
March 3 – April 14, 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.

Pan Daijing – Monograph

Mute at Haus der Kunst

e-Flux Announcement

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Watch trailer here.