Worncumulus: A Weathered Song (Gwangju Theatre), 2026
倦积云：蚀之歌（光州剧场）
multi-channel site-specific sound installation, accompanied by a single-channel silent video
transducers, cassette player, two cassette tapes, wooden boxes, projection, mirror-coated film
dimensions variable
dimensions variable
Sep. 04 - Nov. 15, 2026
"IVAE Pavilion: Gwangju Theatre", Gwangju Biennale
Gwangju, South Korea
"IVAE Pavilion: Gwangju Theatre", Gwangju Biennale
Gwangju, South Korea
Worncumulus: A Weathered Song (Gwangju Theatre) is composed of two entwining cords of sound, each gradually wearing against the other. One circles through the sounds of mechanical repetition and malfunction: rotating wheels, reeling cassette player, and other noises of exhaustion, erosion, interruption and decay. The other drifts through an imagined, absent child singing on cassette, whose voice weathers with the tape itself, yet holds on to its innocence and persistence. The two cords work together to evoke an unresolvedness that persists beneath the running machine of the present.
What lingers on when childhood wears away — in silence, repetition, things worn down by time, and what remains unspoken?
There were once three active cinemas in the artist’s childhood neighbourhood — two were founded in the 1930s, like the Gwangju Theatre, another founded in the 1950s. Pan used to spend time in those cinemas with her parents. Before setting out for Gwangju, she revisited those streets long resting in her memory, to find that only one cinema survived, and that everything either became deserted or simply an accumulation of dust. She was unexpectedly struck by an irresistible feeling of weariness, as if she was possessed by the remote, powerless child that was herself who lived here in the 1990s. There’s a blankness in that weariness, but the feeling itself isn’t blank. Pan was compelled to figure out what the mechanism is behind this weariness, and soon realised that this feeling is, in a way, inherited. Childhood, then, in Worncumulus: A Weathered Song (Gwangju Theatre), is rather a metaphor for the residue of the unresolved past — of a person, of a family, of a generation, or of a place.
The Song is, though itself lyric-less, improvised around Pan’s favourite line from the lyrics of Moscow Nights, a previous USSR song once popular among her parents’ generation and in her own childhood. The line, in Pan’s persistent memory, sings
“Where only leaves rustle.”
But when she researched the song for A Weathered Song, it turned out that the line never existed. She then figured out that she has, from the start when her father taught her the lyrics, misremembered — or inherited her father’s misremembering of — the line
“Where only the gentle wind sings.”
How memory is formed, processed and possessed becomes a central matter in this work.
“Where only leaves rustle.”
But when she researched the song for A Weathered Song, it turned out that the line never existed. She then figured out that she has, from the start when her father taught her the lyrics, misremembered — or inherited her father’s misremembering of — the line
“Where only the gentle wind sings.”
How memory is formed, processed and possessed becomes a central matter in this work.
Drawing inspiration from Pansori, a traditional Korean musical storytelling art form, where the performers are intensely trained to strain and scar their vocal cords, so that they develop a rough, textured voice that serves a particular aesthetic pursuit, Pan finds a counterpart “vocal cord” for her intended “Weathered Song” — the cassette tape. She recorded her own singing voice onto a master tape, then designed a series of experiments (“Archive of Wearing: Tape Weather”) through which the successive tapes are physically exhausted, worn, damaged or eroded.