Developing on her compositional and spatial research, Pan Daijing conceived sonic and architectural interventions for the Gwangju Biennale Hall Bridge and the Octagonal Pavilion located in Jungwoe Park. An ensemble of loudspeakers in each site creates what the artist describes as a “live work”.
As if rehearsing a daily encounter, Scale Figures 2022–3 rehashed the role of infrastructure as at once facilitator and enforcer, connector and barrier, by bringing visitors’ encounters with it into sharp relief through the sonic experience. Mediating the transit between inside and outside, the bridge and the Pavilion offered imaginary ingress into two opposing but dialogical modes of being in the world: the forceful and the vulnerable.
On the bridge, infrastructure resembled obligation, the violent feeling of having “no way out but through”, and the inescapable back and forth between vitality and stillness that is often evoked in Pan’s body of work. Arriving at the Pavilion dissolved this tension by allowing a fleeting moment of serenity, where the violence of compulsory transit was replaced, in the face of the expansive Amphitheatre, with openness of a chance encounter.
The development of this work was supported by the M Art Foundation, and was presented at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea.
www.14gwangjubiennale.com
Pan Daijing (b. 1991, Guiyang, China) is a Berlin-based artist and composer who primarily engages with performance, installation, sound and moving images in her practice. Drawing on the capacity of music to exceed the limits of language and distort the passage of time, Daijing’s work seeks to communicate physical, psychological and sonic depths, and to invoke a collective experience of solitude. Often realized as architectural interventions, her work pressurizes the boundaries between forms and between the alive and inanimate to create enveloping, sensory environments to be inhabited. Pan Daijing has presented and exhibited her work internationally at the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Louvre, Paris (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Tate Modern, London (2019); Biennale of Moving Image, Geneva (2018), among others. In 2024, Pan Daijing will present a solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich and, as the recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, will also exhibit at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has performed at numerous venues and festivals including Barbican Center, London; Kraftwerk, Berlin; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and National Pantheon, Lisbon. She has released three full-length albums, Tissues (2022), Jade (2021), and Lack (2017).
