“Identity is a complicated series of relationships,” Sin Wai Kin suggests, reflecting on how their characters evolve in every work. Depending on the occasion, each identity will also oscillate from main character to NPC; Sin’s focal character for 2024 is Wai King. As Alice Bucknell writes, while the notion of the self dissolves, we also get a lens into deep-time thinking; in their film worlds, Sin creates compositions that wordlessly critique human-made systems.
Hit the link in bio to read “Dreaming Before Language” from 347 Summer 2024.
#SinWaiKin#AliceBucknell#FlashArt347#FlashArtMagazine#FlashArtInternational#FlashArt
My new scent, ‘ESSENCE’ launches tomorrow at the @soft_opening LA residency at Paul Soto with a solo exhibition presenting the full fragrance campaign. More info below:
“In Essence, Sin presents a three-channel film alongside wall-based work and sculpture. In this new project, the character Wai King, who represents an exploration of unbridled masculinity, exists as a brand ambassador for a men’s cologne of the same name. The film features the character casually riding a horse in an Arcadian rural landscape, deep in contemplative thought, while a voice asks “What are you looking for?” Wai King performs as a man on a journey in search of what is intrinsic to his nature, with the advertisement suggesting the answer can be found in Essence, “Something you can’t see”: a new scent available to purchase.
Accompanying the film in the exhibition is a large-scale billboard-style advertisement and two posters in aluminium display frames, each carrying the tagline “Your true self awaits.” This vague but irresistible promise of self-realisation is offered to any owner of Essence, an ultimately scent-less liquid displayed in a custom glass bottle on a plinth in the centre of the gallery space. Sin subverts our normative understanding that the answers we yearn for can be found distilled into an acquirable solution and instead affirms that they remain precisely within the question being asked. We begin to understand that the essence of Essence is not to be found in the scent itself but in the constructed fantasy or narrative that has been built around it.
Essence seeks to reveal how narratives are embodied and reproduced, as well how storytelling not only represents but creates reality: “There isn’t an underlying objective reality that we uncover. What is ‘real’ is what we agree that it is.””
‘Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality’ opens June 20 at @silverlensgallery New York✨ info below:
“Silverlens New York is pleased to announce ‘Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality’, a group exhibition curated by Silverlens founder Isa Lorenzo, opening on 20 June 2024, which celebrates and introduces an international constellation of artists renowned for their visionary practices centering identities and transformation, ranging from drag to the female body and gender.
Featuring Tosh Basco, Geraldine Javier, Eisa Jocson, Yasue Maetake, Citra Sasmita, Sin Wai Kin, and Ming Wong, it presents a roster of artists who work across a variety of practices, media, and form: from painting to sculpture, installation, moving image, performance. ‘Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality’ marks artists Eisa Jocson and Geraldine Javier’s inaugural exhibitions in New York.
‘Soft Fantasy / Hard Reality’ runs from 20 June through 24 August 2024 at Silverlens New York. Join us for an opening reception on 20 June, 6 – 8 PM.”
A special limited edition print to celebrate @gasworkslondon 30th anniversary will be on view at ‘All the Lovers: Editions from 30 Years of Gasworks’ 💛🖼️ Open from 31 May–2 June 2024 at @DavidZwirner London. Join us for the private view on May 31st.
Available through the Gasworks website and shop@gasworks.org.uk
About the work: Sin Wai Kin’s edition for Gasworks is a behind-the-scenes image shot during the filming of Dreaming the End, their 2023 solo exhibition at Fondazione Memmo, Rome. In the centre of the image, Sin sits on an ad-hoc stool, staring intently at a playback monitor. Stepping straight out of a scene of the film, they are wearing a shimmering pink satin dress (designed by Roberto Cappuci) and 7-inch-high clear acrylic heels. Their hair is ice white with voluminous curls, bombshell style, framing their face which is exquisitely painted with a stylised butterfly. Incongruous to the ensemble is an oversized Alpha Industries flight jacket draped around their shoulders, presumably worn to keep warm during shooting.
Change behind the scenes of Dreaming the End is taken by Set Designer Filippo Loy, under the arches of Rome’s iconic Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Mid-production, Sin is accompanied by a crew busy at work. The crew’s practical and comfortable clothes are at odds with Sin’s attire, just as the film-making paraphernalia is at odds with the clean and orderly lines of the Fascist architecture of the building.
Sin Wai Kin, Change behind the scenes of Dreaming the End, 2024. Archival Inkjet print on Canson Infinity Photosatin 270gsm. Edition of 30 + 3APs. Photo: Andy Keate
The Art of Drag is on until October 13th at @franshalsmuseum curated by @maniquehendricks and Maaike Rikhof, the first exhibition in the Netherlands about drag from an art historical perspective. The exhibition includes historical works from artists like Kees van Dongen and Ferdinand Erfman as well as contemporary artworks from Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing and Yamuna Forzani, among others.
Installation views of It’s Always You at The Art of Drag, Frans Hals Museum, Harlem. Photography by Fabian Landewee for Frans Hals Museum.
The Art of Drag Exhibition Publication.
Four of my works have now entered the Tate Collection, purchased with funds provided by the Shane Akeroyd Fund for British Art 2023.
A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still), 2021
Single-channel video, 4K, colour, sound
23 minutes 3 seconds
You have not been given the words to describe how multiple yourselves are, 2019
Makeup on facial wipe
34.5 × 31.5 × 7 cm
Maybe once you were a planet, 2019
Makeup on facial wipe
34.5 × 31.5 × 7 cm
Dragon Woman, 2019
Makeup on facial wipe
34.5 × 31.5 × 7 cm
