On January 16, the Walker Art Center will open the first solo museum exhibition of interdisciplinary Berlin-based artist Pan Daijing (b. 1991, Guiyang, China) in the United States. Daijing is recognized for creating immersive environments that embrace sound, moving images, sculpture, eroding materials, architectural interventions, and choreography. These psychologically charged spaces evoke sensations of entropy, ennui, and melancholia and actively engage visitors in a distinct shared experience. For the upcoming exhibition, Daijing will transform the Walker’s Burnet Gallery into a dark landscape through a range of material and physical alterations. This landscape exists as an artwork onto itself and also features four major works, including two new paintings. Together, the environment and works offer the first significant opportunity for American audiences to connect with Daijing’s visionary practice, which at its core is rooted in performance.
Pan Daijing: Sudden Places will remain on view through July 6, 2025. It is curated by Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collection Strategy at the Walker Art Center, in close collaboration with the artist.
Daijing was born and raised in Guiyang, in Southwestern China. Since 2012, Daijing has traveled and lived abroad extensively, and been based in Berlin since 2015. An acclaimed self-taught composer and musician, Daijing’s highly improvisatory music animates and renews the legacies of noise, concrete, opera, dance music, and industrial sound. She has released several albums to date, among them Tissues (2022), Jade (2021), and Lack (2017), and consistently performed internationally. Her exhibitions are informed by various motives—chiefly the urge to create space for experience and feeling—and result in highly emotive, site-responsive installations. Durational, iterative, and process-centered, Daijing’s artistic practice asks how vulnerable and ephemeral moments of liveness can be transmitted into the future through performance, film, sound, or object.
In Sudden Places, which will be anchored by four works, Daijing manipulates the surrounding environment through precise, yet subtle, alterations of light, sound, and material. Among the works is The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2021-2024), the artist’s most ambitious moving image work to date. It features a cast of performers and actors, including the artist herself, in various indoor and outdoor locations across Hong Kong. Edited with footage shot during Daijing’s travels and various performances, the work shows brief snippets of performers in close interactions—at times together and at times in isolation—suggesting moments of intimacy and dependence.
Woven throughout the space will be the sound and sculptural installation Scale Figures (2021/25), in which the voices of a classically trained counter tenor and mezzo soprano oscillate in a kind of call and response pattern. The fleeting sounds contrast with the installation’s material components—some of which will exist in the exhibition landscape, while others will be scattered in undisclosed locations across the Walker campus—creating a juxtaposition of materiality and immateriality, the hard and soft. Sudden Places also premieres two untitled large-scale paintings (2024/25) in chalk on black canvas, which were made during the artist’s exhibition Mute at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024). Originally the canvases acted as the surfaces of various sculptural assemblages, which performers were encouraged to repeatedly draw on with chalk through a stream of automatic writing processes. The resulting paintings are dense, abstract accretions of time and movement—of the exhibition’s seven weeklong duration and the events that unfolded within.
“Intuitive, improvisational, and deeply responsive to space, the work of Pan Daijing transcends the limitations of language in favor of abstraction,” said Pyś. “Through minimal means, Daijing blurs the boundary separating the artwork and its environment, creating deeply emotive landscapes that conjure a range of associations with solitude, intimacy, and trust. To experience Dajing’s work is to reconcile seemingly what are opposites – the individual and collective, presence and absence, hope and despair.”
ABOUT PAN DAIJING
Pan Daijing (b. Guiyang, China, 1991) lives and works in Berlin. In the summer of 2024, Daijing held a residency at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; and in the fall of this year, she will have a residency at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. She has held solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024); Grazer Kunstverein (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); and Tate Modern, London (2019). She was the recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024. Her works have been included in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2023); Regards de Louvre. Musée du Louvre, Paris (2023); Ghost 2565, Bangkok Dock, Bangkok (2022); 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Geneva (2018). Daijing has performed at the Barbican Centre, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin among many other venues.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Pan Daijing: Sudden Places is organized by the Walker Art Center. The exhibition is made possible with generous support from Lewis Baskerville.