Sin Wai Kin

A woman you thought you knew

A woman you thought you knew by Sin Wai Kin originates from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere. Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting. In this context, drag appears theatrically—over-performing traditional femininity. As someone who identifies as non-binary, Sin, as Victoria Sin, has often come up against questions of validity when performing on the male-dominated drag circuit. Their practice as a drag queen confronts misogyny and racism within the gay, and in particular, the drag community. 

Parallel to producing video pieces on this subject, Sin has created tangible works related to their drag characters. In the case of Victoria Sin, the artist uses face wipes as canvas to capture the blurry lines of gender identity that are probed and pulled apart in their performances. In A woman you thought you knew, the delicate make-up wipe is sandwiched between plexi-glass—preserving the traces or memory of Sin’s drag persona. The work documents, catalogues and questions gendered practices of bodily decoration through the lens of drag performance.