Intentional obfuscation runs through “Sudden Places,” the exhibition by Chinese-born, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Pan Daijing at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Here, viewers are invited to engage both physically and emotionally, exploring layers of meaning through interaction and perception.
Daijing has previously disrupted architectural spaces with projects at Tate Modern’s Tanks in London and Munich’s Haus der Kunst. The Walker Art Center’s sleek, white-walled Burnet Gallery, however, is a far cry from the distinct design of the Tanks, originally used to store oil, and the forbidding totalitarian aesthetic of Haus der Kunst, constructed under the Nazi regime. Smaller in scale, the Burnet’s minimalist “white cube” setting offers Daijing a more intimate space to subvert.
For this installation, Daijing has laid tar paper across the floor, creating a bubbly surface on which to walk. The floor’s uneven texture forces visitors to have an awareness of how they move through the room. In darker areas of the gallery, you can’t necessarily see the floor, but screen light from the video installations casts a glow on the rippled paper, making it look like water.
One of the first installations visible is two paintings in chalk and acrylic, Cream Cut I and Cream Cut II (2024–25), nestled in a cut-out wall. The paintings rest on the insulation inside the drywall. The gesture of burrowing suggests a permanence beyond simply hanging the paintings on the wall. These paintings were originally part of Daijing’s Haus Der Kunst project, where they were created through performances involving automatic writing. Performers inscribed indecipherable marks and words onto the canvases, producing artifacts that captured the energy of the act. The unintelligible written language, eraser strokes, and spastic mark making subliminally express a message of urgent anxiety.
Further on in the same room, Scale Figures (2023/25) suspends delicate brass nests from the ceiling. Dim light casts subtle shadows of the intricate forms onto the wall. Stand close enough and you might hear a startling burst of sound — a dissonant combination of two operatic voices that together sound like a train’s brakes — that punctuates the stillness.
Nearby, a crack in another wall reveals the unseen mechanics of the Walker Art Center’s structure: pipes, scaffolding, and a photograph depicting shadowy figures. Taken together, Scale Figures” meditates on how we form understanding when not everything is known. Offering just hints of sensory details, visitors are left with abstract sensations rather than narratives.
In the same room, a small television monitor sits on the floor for Untitled (2025). The screen seems to show a lighthouse shining its beam in a circular pattern. If you look closely, there appears to be a kind of design filtering the image, so that the lighthouse footage is shown through a vine-like pattern. As a symbol of guidance and homecoming, the beacon lights the path –– though Daijing leaves the destination to the imagination.
The exhibition’s second room features two video installations — the four-channel Faint (2023–24) and the twenty-four-minute-long The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (2021–24). Faint uses four video monitors showing dance footage. One close-up shows a woman crying while another performer runs their fingers against the floor. The actions teem with disquieting internal struggle manifested through subtle movements.
On the other side of the room, a much larger screen plays The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. Sound plays an important role in the film, enveloping the moving images with a layering of sounds like clinking, the sound of an airplane, the sound of a subway, moaning, and static. A voiceover and text weave themes of longing, exploring the liminal shift from dog to wolf in the twilight hours. One scene, shot in a bright white light, depicts a figure twisting back and forth as if in a trance state. Another scene blasts a deep red color like the center of the earth, as the speaker suggests remembering a time before birth.
Ultimately, the film ponders what it means to be present in a moment of transformation. Like the other installations in “Sudden Places,” Daijing’s film work holds a curiosity about the language of mindfulness, using a variety of compositional forms to communicate a network of internal sensations.
