10 Jul 2021 – 23 Dec 2022
Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still), 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London. Produced by Chi-Wen Productions.
Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still), 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London. Produced by Chi-Wen Productions.
Sin Wai Kin brings fantasy to life through storytelling via moving image, performance, writing, sound and print. Non-binary and mixed-race, their work draws on the experience of existing between fixed categories, realising fictional narratives to describe real experiences of desire and identification. Sin began doing drag as a means of ‘deconstructing and challenging misogyny and racism in and outside of the queer community’. Through parody, the artist reveals and interrogates constructed images of idealised Western femininity. In recent years, their drag aesthetic has drawn upon roles found in Peking and Cantonese Opera. The rigidity of these archetypes enables the artist to illuminate the conventional rules and expectations around binaries of not only man and woman, but also self and other, thinking and feeling, life and death, dreaming and waking.
Sin Wai Kin (born 1991, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in London. Sin studied at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art, London.
Sin Wai Kin, Maybe once you were a planet, 2019 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London
Drag helped make me aware of the complexity of gender and the absurdity and violence of a society that tells you that you are one of two genders when you are born, and you are treated accordingly for the rest of your life.
– Sin Wai Kin
Sin Wai Kin, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still), 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei and Soft Opening, London
Sin Wai Kin, Costume for Dreaming, 2021 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London