Human beings love duality: black/white, good/bad, male/female. But not all things in life are that simple - something Canada-born and London-based artist Sin Wai Kin hopes to address in their first solo exhibition in Asia, It's Always You.
"We arrive in the world with narratives predetermined, societal scripts existing, and we have to become ourselves within these narratives that we have no choice over," the artist said.
Socially constructed gender identity is one of the many social scripts Sin wants to address. The Canadian identifies as non-binary, preferring to use the third-person pronoun "they/them."
The exhibition brings up less-discussed topics such as drag culture and queer identity using video installations, posters and even make-up wipes.
Formerly known as Victoria Sin, Sin returned to their gender-neutral Chinese birth name, Sin Wai Kin. "I want to explore not only femininity, the ways that I've been socialized with, but also to masculinity, the ways that I want to inhabit."
Sin references Chuang Tzu's Taoist thinking in Butterfly Dream and The Death of Wonton in A Dream of Wholeness in Parts. "Taoism is about constantly transforming, where positionalities and naming are temporary things."
Gender fluidity is one of the instantly noticeable themes in It's Always You. "The first work that you encounter, Narrative Reflections on Looking, is the first time that I was able to bring drag into my work. Narrative cinema gave me control over the way that people were consuming the artworks," they said.
Sin also prioritized storytelling as a crucial component of the video installations. "Storytelling is a really important way for me to redefine these relationships and to center perspectives that are often marginalized, including my own."
As a fan of boybands, Sin saw potential in using the members' characterizations to address the sense of self. "I was thinking of this idea of one body as a multiplicity, one person containing multitudes and being different people at the same or different times, which is something that we all do - we have an active self that we present to any kind of social circumstances, which is different depending on work or with friends and family or alone."
So Sin integrated four separate works - The Universe (the pretty boy), The Storyteller (the serious one), The One (the childish one) and Wai King (the heartthrob) - to form a boy band, It's Always You.
"I was thinking about a community as one body, the idea of solidarity and the whole being more than the sum of its parts. The boyband is a perfect vehicle to talk about that," they said.
Sin Wai Kin's "It's Always You" at Blindspot Gallery will run until Jan 15.
