Chinese artist’s Hong Kong installation at Tai Kwun wrapped music, dance and theatre in a dark, surreal shroud to produce something magical
- Pan Daijing’s ‘Echo, Moss and Spill’ installation was the concluding part of Tai Kwun’s eight-month-long ‘Trust and Confusion’ exhibition
- Echoing earlier works in the exhibition, the installation was decidedly darker but always gave a sense of there being light at the end of the tunnel
Artist Pan Daijing’s recent takeover of an entire floor of Tai Kwun’s contemporary art gallery, held during the last throes of an unremittingly disastrous year and the cheerless birth of a new one, was a melancholy coda to the gallery’s eight-month-long curatorial endeavour labelled “Trust & Confusion”, conceived for these uncertain and worrying times.
The audience’s first encounter with Pan’s “Echo, Moss and Spill”, a site-specific commission by Tai Kwun that concluded on January 2, was a purely aural one. Called One Hundred Nine Minus (2021), this haunting recording of two operatic voices had been playing by the gallery’s spiral staircase since June. It was devised as a gentle introduction to the rest of the commission unveiled in December, comprising a two-channel video filmed in Hong Kong over the summer and a series of live, six-hour-long improvised performances by the film’s cast members.
However, Pan’s surreal, trancelike creations were decidedly darker, an ever-present horror lurking in the grating, mechanical notes of the soundtracks and the blood-red floor cover on which the blank-faced actors moved about in grey uniforms.
Speaking in Hong Kong on the last day of 2021, Pan, 30, said she equated expressions of sadness and fear to honesty. “I don’t exaggerate or make things more beautiful than they are. I want to give a sense of truth and honesty.”
Neither did she dwell on maudlin self-pity. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel – sometimes literally, such as a scene in the film where actors are seen climbing up a dark shaft towards brightness. Or when the performers hold each other and reach out to members of the audience, cutting through the otherwise cold and threatening set with the warmth of human connection.
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“We must be aware of our mental health. I want to give people a sense of hope,” she said.
Pan had spent a total of four months (including two stints in quarantine) in Hong Kong because of the project. To her, Hong Kong bore an uncanny resemblance to the hilly, land-bound city of Guiyang in mainland China where she spent the first 17 years of her life.
“Maybe being abroad has made me nostalgic. I really love my hometown. Hong Kong feels shockingly familiar to me. Maybe it’s the intimacy of the space – everything’s close together, like Guiyang. Also, the street food culture here is just as vibrant. And the warmth of strangers makes me think of home. Relationships here are not just transactional. There is often engagement without purpose here, and it has really inspired me.”
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Her physical and spiritual home these days is Berlin, where she moved six years ago after spending 18 months in California as an exchange student. It was in Berlin that she found her true calling as a sound and performance artist.
“I was this boring, generic, straight-A student, always expected to do the ‘right’ thing. I went to the top Beijing university to study accountancy, not because I wanted to, but because I wasn’t allowed to waste my good grades. I never felt like an outsider, but I have always felt very sad. But in certain cultures, darkness is something that’s shamed, and social media has definitely made things worse,” she said. That’s partly why she lives away from China. In California, “sadness was allowed”, she felt.
“I have a very quiet and stable life in Berlin. It’s the place I feel good to go back to. It is my shelter. Berlin has been so generous to me. I was not in a good place mentally when I arrived. People there do not judge and nothing can shock them. I feel very comfortable with this attitude of indifference. And it is in Berlin where I came across sound art. It felt so right that I felt that the sounds chose me,” she said.
That her work is truthful doesn’t mean it is lifelike. In fact, the different manifestations of the actors experienced by the audience – first through sounds, then on screen, and finally in flesh and blood – was rather magical. Occasionally emitting high-pitched wails, the actors were like spirits drifting across different dimensions.
“To me, the sounds are related to the idea of haunting. It’s not about a story but the scent and aura. It is about recreating memories at a time when there is a risk of losing memories to false information and information overflow,” Pan said.
“Growing up in China, censorship is an everyday thing. And so we use a lot of metaphor and unspoken messages that can still be transmitted. Not all memories are lost.”
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At a time when history has become the site of fierce contest, Pan is also intent on taking “relics” of the Hong Kong performances with her back to Germany.
“The performers have been writing their names on the wall of the gallery every day and these will be preserved as relics, on top of photographs and videos,” she said.
She intends to incorporate these memory aids in her preparations for a future exhibition in Europe. “I will take these with me and I will recreate my memory of the work here. Art-making should be a conversation between myself and the space, the audience and the performers. And I really felt that in Hong Kong.”
“Echo, Moss and Spill” (2021) was enacted at Tai Kwun Contemporary from Dec 16, 2021 – Jan 2, 2022 as the finale to “Trust & Confusion”, a project curated by Xue Tan and Raimundas Malasauskas.
