Pan Daijing 'Tissues'

Pan Daijing’s exhibition-performance 'Tissues' premiered in the Tanks at the Tate Modern in autumn 2019. A fiveact immersion in performance, sound, movement, space, and most of all emotion in its 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 its formal and emotional core. The vinyl release of 'Tissues' on Pan serves as a record of that work, in the form of an hour-long audio excerpt: an invaluable archival document from Daijing’s expansive live 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—its 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 its interiority, 'Tissues' foregrounds an intimate relationship with its audience through details like its engulfing visual landscape and its 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 acts 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 heard in a single listen, rather than track by track, the work unfolds through tender hollows and agitated peaks. At its crescendo, the operatic vocals melt away and the synthesizers themselves seem to howl with grief.