The photo shows a construction with a mechanical roof under which a red bridge can be seen. In the background there are apartment buildings, with the Korean flag flying under the bridge. The photo is a part of the 14th Gwangju Biennial taking place from April 7th to July 9th in Gwangju, Republic of Korea. © Pan Daijing
Scale Figures, 2022-2023 Voice, eight-channel loudspeakers, black and white print on leather, stainless steel and rubber © Pan Daijing Commissioned by the 14th Gwangju Biennale

14th Gwangju Biennale

soft and weak like water

7 Apr 2023
 - 
9 Jul 2023

111, Biennale-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju
500-845 Gwangju

Pan Daijing is a Berlin-based artist and composer who channels sound to tell stories across various forms and disciplines. Her cutting-edge approach combines raw emotions and poetic sensibilities. Pan works intensely with the human voice, employing operatic vocalisation to reduce the perceived distance between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the surroundings which it activates. She explores how the physical and psychological space shape our perception of sonic experience, often through site-responsive performances and installations. Developing on her compositional and spatial research, Pan has 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 rehashes 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 offer imaginary ingress into two opposing but dialogical modes of being in the world: the forceful and the vulnerable.

On the bridge, infrastructure resembles 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. Arrival at the Pavilion dissolves this tension by allowing a fleeting moment of serenity, where the violence of compulsory transit is replaced, in the face of the expansive Amphitheatre, with openness of a chance encounter.

Funded artist: 
Pan Daijing

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