About This Item
On Red Vinyl. Pan Daijing's exhibition-performance Tissues premiered in the Tanks at the Tate Modern in autumn 2019. A five-part immersion in performance, sound, movement, space, and most of all emotion in it's most distilled and conflicted states, Tissues engaged with the conventions of opera and tragedy to present a searing representation of the embattled human psyche in space and time. While the ambitious multi-sensory artwork made use of the range of Daijing's artistic capabilities, music, particularly the voice, was at it's formal and emotional core. The vinyl and digital of Tissues on PAN serves as a record of that work, in the form of an hour-long, studio-recorded audio excerpt an invaluable archival document from Daijing's practice. Tissues is both a solitary work and a formal study in relation. Composed, directed, designed, written, and performed by Daijing (alongside a cast of twelve dancers and opera singers), the work-it's libretto written in a mixture of old and modern Chinese-lingers inside a single human perspective. Daijing conjures states that are by turns delicate and severe, the tension between opposing modes animating the work as it unfolds. And yet, for all it's interiority, Tissues foregrounds an intimate relationship with it's audience through details like it's engulfing visual landscape and it's rattling, confrontational narrative arcs. Daijing uses the opera form as a prism through which to question the boundaries of music itself perhaps, she proposes, music is much more than simply what is heard. It is in the relationship between voice and electronics that this limit is most clearly breached. Across the four parts gathered in this documentation, a counter-tenor, a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and the artist herself voice a mixture of stunning laments and cries over an instrumental landscape, built out from industrial texture. Meant to be hea
