The universe that I'm creating with my practice is really meant to act as a mirror
in the same way that every character that I'm trying to create is a reflection or
a site for people to see themselves
My name is Sin Wai Kin I'm an artist using
speculative fiction to deconstruct and reconstruct social narratives
In my practice I think the characters came before the universe, I started with one
character who ws my original character that I called Victoria Sin but as more characters
were born I started to realise that the relationship between the characters was
just as important as the characters themselves and that's what a universe is it's a really
complicated mesh of relationships I really want people to exist in my world and see it
as kind of like a new perspective that they can look back on their everyday life with
So I would say the most important influence in my work is science fiction
I was a big sci-fi
nerd when I was young and when I came back to it as an adult I think what really struck me
was the way that certain authors could create this other world and create a fantasy that you
can work towards being a reality
There's also philosophy that uses fantasy for example like
the Zhuangzi which uses fantasy allegories in order to kind of like illustrate and play
out relationships and conversations about what it means to exist in a world that's constantly
changing and how to really be at peace with the fact that nothing is ever going to be the same
So the presence of my body in my work was never really a conscious decision I think it started
with my first character I was looking back on it really trying to unpick very personal embodied
relationship with Western femininity that I had been socialised with, that I had been conditioned
to want and I found that by embodying and then disembodying this kind of ideal image like many
times I was able to kind of separate what I wanted and what other people wanted from me
and I continue to do that with all of my characters
I remember reading on a piece
of paper in Octavia Butler's archives 'the more personal, the more universal' and that's really a
cornerstone of my practice
So I am investigating these very personal relationships that I have
with different binaries with different social narratives and then abstracting
them through a lens of speculative fiction, of drag, of fantasy and making them things that
everybody can identify with because we all have an experience of existing in binary narratives
My process of storytelling I think is different with every work but usually it starts with writing
and when I start to build a script I'm pulling from small bits of writing and trying to find the
through line of the themes that I've been kind of experiencing or thinking through
While I'm doing this writing I'm also drawing, I'm doing character sketches
things often kind of come together very
slowly until something fits into place, it's like a puzzle often that I'm trying to piece together
and that continues not only through the writing process but through the
filming process or in the case of the performance it's still being realised in
the actual performing of the work and the relationship between me and the audience
I mean I think one of the most interesting things about making films for me is going
from like the shooting process to the post-production process and the edit
is really where I see the work become itself you know it's like sculpting
and the kind of sound element it starts bringing in something totally different
It's Always You features four of my characters in a boy band: The Storyteller, The Universe
The One and Wai King
I think a boy band is a really perfect medium to think about how identities are constructed
You have the sexy one, you have the serious one, the playful one and this kind of
individualisation of the characters is played up for often kind of like marketing purposes
but they can't exist on their own and putting them all together in this way is trying to
think about the idea of like a multiplicity as one body
I really wanted to play with the way that identities and desire are constructed within
capitalism and that's why you have the kind of ephemera of the posters and the
cutouts but really what you're desiring in these characters is something in yourself
So I want people when they experience the work to be completely immersed in
the work to forget about the outside world for a period of time to allow themselves
to believe these reconfigured relationships with their body and with the world and then
to go back to their everyday lives and have experienced this kind of view from
elsewhere, this new perspective to look differently at the world around them