A woman you thought you knew

2017 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

34.5 x 31.5 x 8.5 cm

Sin Wai Kin

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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.

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Through performance, moving image, writing, and print, artist Sin Wai Kin (formerly known as Victoria Sin) uses speculative fiction to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. For Sin, drag is an intentional practice that addresses the reification of prescribed and homogenous imagery of the body, gender, and sexuality perpetuated by technologies of representation and systems of looking. Referencing their own embodied knowledge, Sin’s drag personas fabricate narratives of fantasy that critically reflect on the complex experience of performing the physicality of the body, while mediated by various and intertwined social structures. Sin is a leading voice amongst a generation of image-makers challenging representations of gender in art and society.

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Colors:

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• sex.n.04
• drag.n.04
• femininity.n.01
• body.n.01
• identity.n.01