Tradition meets fantasy in Sin Wai Kin’s subversion of storytelling

Portraits become a portal into a fantasy narrative for Sin Wai Kin, who has created a series of imagined figures for their exhibition at London’s Soft Opening gallery. 

Sin’s moving image character portraits become the embodiment of different concepts. They each represent and reinterpret a traditional storytelling strand in Cantonese and Peking Opera, from ‘Change’, representing the inevitable permeance of change, and warrior god ‘The Universe’, to the personification of the binary of good and evil, ‘The Construct’, ‘The Storyteller’ and ‘Wai King’, symbolising rampant masculinity.

‘I have been focused on the act of storytelling for the past few years and how it not only represents but creates reality,’ says Sin. ‘History is storytelling and I wanted to draw attention to art history and the construction of the subject. Images operate in the same way as storytelling, they construct at the same time as they represent, and the Western history of art is there in the genealogy of images when we look at anything. 

‘I chose to weave my characters into these existing art historical works in order to make that relationship explicit, and to think about the relationship between the author and the subject. I am addressing dominant narratives in order to present alternatives. The construction of my characters is in a way addressing the construction of the self since I play all my characters, but a cornerstone of my practice is “the more personal, the more universal”. Each character focuses on a different area of research or binary that I am trying to undo, so each of these works is a literal meditation on those themes and a continuation of my practice of embodied speculative fiction.’

Sin translates this process into the silent films in the gallery, which play on an endless loop, each referencing a famous artwork. ‘The works are presented on screens whose sizes are relative to the artworks they are referencing,’ Sin adds. ‘The screens are performing as paintings, which is why they sit on the wall at painting height in front of a white theatrical curtain. The white curtains reference the white cube, the default ‘neutral’ art space of the art world. The installation is demonstrating that the white cube is not a neutral or empty space but one that is itself performing a hegemonic narrative.’

The installation leads to a second space cast in a chroma-green hue, where five faceless busts face outwards, confronting the viewer. ‘The binary of individual and context is something I am trying to express through the use of chroma green. Individuals are a reflection of the context in which they are produced, are a part of it and inseparable from it. All of these works were shot on [a] green screen, in some cases I have chosen to replace the screen with a CGI background, others I have left in order to make clear the means of construction of the works and to leave an infinite possibility in the relationship of the subject and context. The second room of the exhibition mimics the film studio where the works were shot as well as creating a play on a green room, the room backstage where performers often get ready and relax off stage. As people enter this room, I want them to be the performers, to question their relationship to their context, and invite that infinite possibility.’

Sin Wai Kin, ‘Portraits’, is on until 16 December 2023 at Soft Opening, London

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