Sin Wai Kin

Sin Wai Kin’s The Breaking Story (2022), commissioned by Sunpride Foundation, is a six-channel video installation, each presenting an extraterrestrial news anchor reporting from parallel universes. Embodied in the reporters are Sin’s recurring characters of The Storyteller and Change.  The Storyteller is Sin’s first masculine persona derived from Today’s Top Stories (2020), drawing upon the powerful role storytelling plays in our culture, as a form of human technology of knowledge and truth production that creates a world of biases and binaries. Change symbolizes metamorphosis, conceived in their performance “the story changes the body changes (repeating)” (2022) commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

One after the other, the cosmic news anchors, three of whom are played by The Storyteller and three of whom are portrayed by Change, report on anything but the news, rather, they provoke philosophical propositions on existence, consciousness, and the performative nature of identities. Each persona of The Storyteller and Change exists as parallel manifestations of themselves in alternate realities where they adopt different roles, presenting an individual multiplicity wherein one body holds different identities and truths. By being in conversation with one another, the reporters attempt to construct a new reality.

Forming a four-piece boyband whose members comprise of masculine drag characters, Sin Wai Kin presents It’s Always You (2021), a new project composing of a dual-channel music video and various boyband ephemera that celebrate queer joy. Sin adopts the role of all four members in their boyband; each assuming an independent persona that strives to take on radically open positions, an embodiment of the multiplicity of identities that transcend man-made binaries.

The One (2020) features Sin deep in meditation, eyes shut, stationery, breathing. With the sun disk as his third eye, the outline of the body is relocated to the face, and the mouth stands in for every orifice, redefining and eroticising the limits of the body. There is no more division between self and world, mind and body, individual and context. The One originally appeared in the many faced god.dess (2021) commissioned by Maison Populaire, Montreuil.

Inspired by the skillfulness and fluidity in which Chinese opera singers put on myriad gendered roles, Sin intentionally turns to masculine drag, along with the recent announcement to return to their gender-neutral Cantonese birth name, Sin Wai Kin 單慧乾. The artist describes this turn as one of “trying things on, rather than taking things off”. While Sin’s drag queen persona stripped bare the expectations of femininity and its relationship to womanhood, their drag king modality evolves space to experiment and play with fantasy in masculinity.
Today’s Top Stories (2020) features a news reporter in intergalactic cable television, giving simultaneously true and false, real and fictional accounts of a quantum universe as a proto-star gestates in the background. The newscaster is The Storyteller, with his face mimicking an imploding red giant star, debunking all boundaries between being and non-being. Today’s Top Stories was commissioned by the Tank Art Museum, Shanghai, as part of the exhibition More, More, More.

In the plague year of 2020, their journey takes them inwards into the rigorous imagination of the mindscape in virtual backgrounds, giving birth to a plethora of characters. Irreconcilable Differences (2020) shows The Clowns, two feminine characters, one in Western dress and one in Oriental garment, engaging in a non-linguistic argument. The meaningless enunciation couples with reproachful and scornful body language, and enumerates many a pointless squabble that sees no reconciliation, an apt reflection of current affairs in the world. Irreconcilable Differences premiered at the ICA London, and was recently awarded the B3 BEN Award for Best Immersive and Time- based Art.

A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2019-2021) marks a cinematic turn for Sin. The poetic epic unfolds into a mytho-realistic dreamscape, inspired by famous musings of foundational Taoist writing, such as the “Butterfly Dream” and “The Death of Wonton” by Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). In the mediation of Chinese metaphysics, Sin debunks the Aristotelian logic and categories that produce the false dichotomies in our world, such as self and other, waking and dreaming, male and female, fragments and totality, life and death, fantasy and reality.

Narrative Reflections on Looking (2016-2017) marks an important development in the practice of then-named Victoria Sin, who started integrating fictional film narratives into their established club- based drag performances. The four-part series comprises staged scenes where Sin poses in glamorous drag regalia, as the camera moves sensuously in close-ups of their body. In a first-person voiceover, Sin guides the experience of looking and identifying with the images in real time, troubling the space of desire in the process of identification. Sin shows that there is no innocent looking, that our relationship to images is promiscuous.