The artist and composer Pan Daijing was born in Guiyang, China, where she followed a conventional path, acing her college entrance exams to gain admission to a premier university. Once she got there, she knew she wanted a different life. Daijing is an autodidact; she has never had formal training as an artist. Her relationship with the notion of artistic discipline is fluid—if she’s interested in practice, she works towards developing the capacity of doing and making in it—rather like learning a language. She has worked in visual art, architecture, film, performance and music, showing work since 2012, with notable solo exhibitions at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, Tate Modern in London and recently, in Munich, where she showed Mute, her largest solo exhibition to date, at the Haus der Kunst. Mute is curated by Sarah Johanna Theuer with Lydia Antoniou, Emma Enderby and Andrea Lissoni. Daijing turned Haus der Kunst’s expansive and cavernous spaces into an immersive environment for her tapestry of choreography, architectural intervention, sound and moving image.

Daijing termed her show a ‘live exhibition’, with four hours of performance in the space every day. In a departure from exhibition conventions, there were no wall texts; the audience was encouraged to be curious, wandering through the space and arriving at a relationship to her work. The curators of the exhibition frame Mute as a survey exhibition of her work so far. But instead of merely transplanting past objects and moments into the present, she reconstructs experiences from what she remembers and senses. Around the time of this interview, Daijing had just returned to the exhibition in Munich after a few weeks away. As part of her engagement with the building’s original architecture, she poured resin into the cracks on the floor in one space. This created patterns on the floor; it seemed to Daijing as if there was a whole world under the building that was leaking through the cracks in the floor.

Daijing thinks in real time as an artist, often stepping into the role of the performer to implicate herself in her work. Her music, including her work in Mute, lends itself to immersive listening. Daijing’s previous albums, like Lack (2017) put together uncanny sounds—operatic human voices, primordial growls and arhythmic instrumental tones. Daijing’s music takes you on an emotional journey—at the end of each track, you realise how far you have travelled from the eerie uncertainty of the beginning.

Excerpts from a conversation with STIR:

Ranjana Dave: You speak about how ‘doing’ is the way to define something for you, as an autodidact. The act of doing, as opposed to just the act of choreographing, composing and filming, allows you to rehearse something into being. Could you reflect on how you travel between and through the diverse practices that make up your work? Is there even a conscious journey you take between these practices?

Pan Daijing: I like the word ‘conscious journey’. It is very much a conscious journey for me. This consciousness also helped me dive into a zone that felt close enough to the feeling of freedom. If we are pursuing a sense of freedom in the process of creating, it needs to be unbiased. Unbiased towards oneself, towards my own background, history, methods of working—not to have a conclusion—and to learn from within every day. This allows me to maintain an openness to the world around me, to the medium that reveals itself to me, or information in the world. I'm looking for this dialogue between my world and the world around me and constantly reflecting, constantly shifting my perception. Sometimes it is just about being present and trusting the process; sometimes one needs to pause the brain, let the heart speak and then gather that information and process it with the mind. From the very beginning, it was clear that I wasn’t trying to create something ‘good’ because I never wanted to know what's good.

Ranjana: I appreciate what you say about not setting out to make something that is ‘good’ because that becomes a very virtuosic metric when you're making work. In Mute, where several of your works sit alongside each other, they also carry a sense of time within them—the time in which they were made and the one in which they are being experienced. Do you see this as revisiting or reinvoking your work?

Pan: I see it more like a continuous stream of work; there is the past, there is the stream under my feet, and of course, it leads to the future. The making of this exhibition amplified this sort of reflection—I don’t necessarily consider it a reproduction or representation; it's more about reflecting, remixing—in material and method. Sometimes, distance, whether it is time or physical distance, is a very beautiful thing, because when you are in the middle of this tornado of excitement and discovery, you might not be able to see certain things that need to reveal themselves. This process of making a survey exhibition is very interesting for me because a lot of my work lies in the power of the ephemeral. I believe in experiencing the moment; it’s hard to grasp, so the act of distilling becomes very natural. I felt this was the most honest way to look back at something. When we experience a memory, it is sometimes so abstract and so vivid at the same time – it feels impossible to just recreate it—and knowing that the recreation wouldn't be the same, why would I bother to do so? Making this exhibition for me is about how I can take the opportunity to allow it to fit into the next stage of my language as an artist.

Ranjana: In online interviews, you have talked about the frustrating process of preparing for college entrance exams, which felt very familiar, because Indian parents also place a great emphasis on such exams. What sparked your interest in noise, coming from a university education in accounting? We use the term ‘noise’ to describe sounds we are not paying attention to, sounds we aren’t acknowledging as part of our soundscape. How do you approach noise as a compositional and choreographic principle?

Pan: As you said, this question really starts with the definition of noise. What noise is for us? It's not something noisy. I think noise has this quality of being unbiased. Anything could be and can be an element of a composition and that for me offers a sense of freedom. We grew up in countries that are highly competitive and our individual needs and human rights are ignored, or not necessarily the topic of a daily (reckoning of) how our growth can potentially bring us to a place of happiness. For me, I felt like I never went to school. At the same time, I also studied really hard and did well in all those exams. I consider it a kind of physical training for (will)power. It becomes a habit. You (develop) tolerance, strength, endurance. Noise came to me at the darkest time of my life, at least in my short life so far. You know, it's when you were promised a kind of freedom and then you worked hard for it. And when you are finally past that gate, you realise everything was a lie, and that breaks one's heart. So in those very heartbreaking moments, music revealed its power to me. I felt grateful for it. My engagement with music as an art form has taught me so many lessons about how to live and how to be a person. For me, this is a sacred zone. When I write music, when I compose, I'm smashing myself into pieces and blowing those pieces into the air. And then I inhale the dust. So then it does feel very organic in a way. It takes a lot of practice.

Ranjana: That's a lovely metaphor—what you said about smashing yourself to pieces. We often don't think of the body as being implicated in all forms of art practice, but it is, whether it's writing, making music or dancing. It takes a lot for the body to make itself available and sustain itself through the process.

Pan: I think people who are comfortable connecting with themselves or expressing themselves physically have a different sensibility. I find that it’s a privilege to experience something to the fullest (extent) possible.

Ranjana: My sense of your exhibitions and performances is that they set up immersive environments—film, sound, movement—that audiences are enveloped by—to the point where this sometimes begins to blur the line between the audience and the performer.

Pan: I guess when it comes to a relationship (with the audience), it's more of an exchange, ‘feedbacking’ into each other. I absolutely consider the equality you mentioned—I perceive my work between the message deliverer and the viewer, the people who are speculating in the space. For me, they are also in a much bigger dialogue with the space itself. Architecture is a core concern; it is the beginning of everything for me. The environment, the spatial relation we have with it—the door and the window, the light, the texture, in all of these things there is already a natural dance. And I am going in to choreograph the space rather than the movement. And in that sense, I believe in experiencing and liveness. Liveness, not as live music, but as living together. Of course, I am still a touring musician, which means I perform on stage alone in the spotlight with the audience standing in front of me—50 (people), sometimes 5000 (people). But that’s a very different relationship. And of course, we as visual animals are very much taken by protagonists. In the Munich show, there were over 50 works. And I didn’t want any (wall) texts or explanations. So when you walk around the exhibition, you are just engaging with a larger environment. And there is this ambiguity, the feeling of something absent, lacking, but also so frontal. This uncertainty brings you into a different zone. Rather than “this is the work, this is the material”.

Ranjana: You can never predict how that interaction is going to work. How does the witnessing and experiencing of your work factor into your creative process, both in terms of the creative decisions you take and in what you hear from audiences?

Pan: The audience becomes a collaborator while experiencing the offering I make. My work is not a documentation darling. Not because we can't document it; it's not about what's going on, or what has happened. It's this stretch, this scale, this playfulness in movement and motion in the space, where one has to come in and collaborate. That is why I always try to insert performative actions. It's also interesting for me to observe this interaction…the width of an arm and how it cuts through the door frame. (During one visit) I saw one of the performers standing at a distance. It was just (the two of us) in the space. He opened out his arms, slowly and then he moved away. And as he walked away from me, farther and farther, I felt closer and closer to him. As he disappeared through the door frame, I felt (as if) I was missing him. This is something I experienced myself and I would love to offer that possibility to others, for them to come in and to take whatever they need from that moment. It's a living space – we as humans going into a space are reminded of what it feels like to be human. Because very often, we are deaf to our own heartbeat.