Pan Daijing: Sudden Places

In a wide-ranging practice that spans music, visual art, and performance, Berlin-based artist Pan Daijing (Guiyang, China, b. 1991) focuses on the fleeting experience of liveness. Training attention on profound and intimate details—images of fingers brushing over skin, the sound of our own footsteps—the artist frames a time and space of constant transformation.

Anchored by five core works, Daijing’s first solo US museum exhibition, Sudden Places, incorporates painting, sculpture, sound, and moving image. In a study of materiality and presence, her installation Scale Figures (2021/2025) plays out across the Walker campus, drawing on operatic call-and-response motifs in dialogue with suspended sculpture. Within the gallery, Dajing’s ambitious film The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2021–2024) offers a meditation on the relationship between solitude and interdependence.

Blurring the boundaries between individual pieces and their surroundings, these artworks are installed in a dark, immersive landscape alongside other works intentionally left unidentified. Psychologically charged and full of poetry and visual rhyming, the gallery becomes an artwork in its own right, a space of light and sound.