Southside, Hong Kong
Sin Wai Kin
The Time of Our Lives
Blindspot GalleryBlindspot Gallery is pleased to present Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives, marking the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features Sin's latest video works: The Time of Our Lives (2024), The Fortress (2024), and Asleep (2024). These will be shown alongside face wipes imprinted with the make-up of Sin's characters featured in the films. This marks the final stop of a touring solo exhibition that has travelled to Accelerator (Stockholm), and is on show at Kunsthall Trondheim (Trondheim) and at Canal Projects (New York). Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives immerses audiences into the artist's cinematic multiverse, comprising a recurring repertoire of characters, all played by Sin. The works in the exhibition draw upon science-fiction, metaphysics, cinema, drag performance, history, theater, and architecture to challenge the dichotomous and binary perceptions of time, objectivity and identity. The notion of the stage, the scripted lines, the role, and the performer takes precedence across the works, prompting contemplation as to how reality is often built on pre-existing narratives and reified constructs. Sin's works untethers this notion through speculative fiction and fantasy world-building, presenting the artist as a carrier bag of fiction. Upon entering the exhibition, the audience is presented with The Fortress, first premiered at the Lahore Biennale 2024. The film unfolds with the interiors of Alfalah Theatre, with Wai King, Sin's reappearing hyper masculine, flippantly hot, red-haired heartthrob rehearsing lines over and over at the back stage of the theater. He recites sentences in the form of a Shakespearean soliloquy off-and-onstage, re-asserting to his audience his position of superiority and othering. Transported to Lahore Fort, we meet his ghost, The Mask of Wai King, a subconscious who is aware of the truth of the human experience. His face is a mask lifted off a starry night sky, an external manifestation of the self's internal split. The Fort is the site of manufacture for truth and history, and yet it is here that the figure encounters the fallacy of a linear narrative with man at the center of the universe. The work takes inspiration from Mathnawi by the Sufi poet Rūmī. The Fortress is co-commissioned by Lahore Biennale Foundation and Forma, and supported by The British Council and Shane Akeroyd. On the adjacent wall to The Fortress is a row of television show posters for Sin's two-channel video The Time of Our Lives, a "sci-fi sitcom" starring Wai King and V Sin, Sin's hype-femme blond bombastic drag queen. They play a stereotypical all-American couple, alongside The Storyteller, the orange-haired intergalactic newscaster who disseminates contradictions and paradoxes as truths on their television. The first channel of The Time of Our Lives shows a "live" studio take of the hit television show. Taking on tropes of sitcoms about family life, the space opera focuses on a day in the life of Wai King and V Sin, except absolute time has been upended. Time and space work differently in this universe, wherein the characters slip in and out of dimensions, oscillating between past, present, and future, dreams and reality. A doomsday clock ticks in their living room as The Storyteller warns of an impending apocalypse coming their way. The mirroring channel shows a studio audience reacting to prompted cues. Sat between the screens, the viewer is caught in liminality, unsure if they are part of the audience or if they too are being watched. Drawing from theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the work challenges assumptions about truth and causality, reality becoming suddenly elusive. Derived from The Time of Our Lives, Asleep is a video portrait of V Sin. Donning a blonde platinum high hair, long eyelashes, voluptuous breasts, and starry night eye lids, she appears as a mid-century technicolor Hollywood pinup. Asleep is a tableau vivant of Sin's first drag persona, created to reexamine their relationship with Western femininity through the lens of parody. Displayed together with the works are face wipes that memorialize the fleeting personas in Sin's films. As a material synonymous with the dressing room, the face wipe harks back to Sin's earlier days as a drag performer. Each piece is enshrined in an acrylic case, presented as a relic of the dismantling of a character, dissolving the distinction between performer and role. The work becomes an uncanny reminder of not merely the character, but also the self underneath the mask. Coinciding with the exhibition, Sin's new work Reality War (2025), commissioned for "Picasso for Asia: A Conversation", will be on view at M+ (15 March –13 July, 2025). Sin's exhibition takes place alongside Chen Wei's solo exhibition Breath of Silence at the gallery. This will mark the second time that the two artists' works are being exhibited together, following Transformer: The Rebirth of Wonder at 180 The Strand in London. Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, Canada) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness. Sin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2022 and the 2024 Jarman award. They were the recipient of the 24th Baloise Art Prize. Current solo exhibitions include Canal Projects (2025) and Kunsthall Trondheim (2025). Recent solo exhibitions were held at Accelerator (2024), Mudam Luxembourg (2024), Buffalo AKG Art Museum (New York, 2024), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2023), and Fondazione Memmo (2023). Group exhibitions include Lahore Biennale 03 (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2024 & 2019), Somerset House (2024 & 2023), Mudam Luxembourg (2023), Tate Liverpool (2022), Tai Kwun Contemporary (2022), and the British Museum (2022). Sin's works are held in the collections of Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), Tate Collection (UK), the British Museum Prints & Drawings (UK), White Rabbit Gallery (Australia), Ferens Art Gallery (UK), the Ingram Collection of Modern British Art (UK), Buffalo AKG Art Museum (USA), Sunpride Foundation (Hong Kong), and M+ (Hong Kong). Sin currently lives and works in London, UK.