Issue
Up Close: Pan Daijing
When describing a mood, we often draw on the lexicon of bodily movement—“sinking” into melancholy, “falling” in love. Our inner landscapes seem inseparable from our physical gestures and the spaces we inhabit. Rainer Maria Rilke recognized this connection, coining the term Weltinnenraum (“world-inner-space”) to express how our experiences of the external world invite us into an inner realm of emotion. As his 1914 poem declares, “almost all things beckon us to feeling.” Since 2015, Berlin-based artist Pan Daijing has continuously explored the relationships between body, affect, and space. Working across sound, video, performance, and installation, she transforms architectural environments into psychological terrains where the fleeting and contradictory nature of human sentiments—intimacy and unease, tenderness and threat, love and its inevitable pain—converge and take form.