Pan Daijing: Sudden Places

On January 16, the Walker Art Center will open Pan Daijing: Sudden Places, the first museum solo 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. 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 will also feature four major pieces, 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 she has traveled and lived abroad extensively, and has been based in Berlin since 2015. An acclaimed self-taught composer and musician, Daijing creates highly improvisatory music that 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 has consistently performed internationally.

Sudden Places will be anchored by four works, and informed Daijing’s manipulation of 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. Sudden Places also premieres two untitled large-scale paintings (2024/2025) in chalk on black canvas, which were made during the artist’s exhibition Mute at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024).

“Intuitive, improvisational, and deeply responsive to space, the work of Pan Daijing transcends the limitations of language in favor of abstraction,” says 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 Daijing’s work is to reconcile seemingly what are opposites—the individual and collective, presence and absence, hope and despair.” 

Curatorial team: Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts.