Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives

About the exhibition

In The Time of Our Lives, a science fiction sitcom is played out. It depicts a day in the home of a stereotypical, wholesome all-American couple. In this two-channel video installation, the chronology is circular and set in an indefinable time. For this work, Sin has deepened their long interest in physics and cosmology, looking at different aspects of time as a concept. Drawing from theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, the work plays with the idea that there is no absolute time. This is used as a metaphor for the experience of reality as an individual and a questioning of assumptions about objective truth – something Sin often returns to.

Sin works with performance, moving image, installation, writing, and print, but above all else, their practice is one of storytelling. In their work, there is an inherent concentration on the power of language over the personal and social body, and a belief that the stories told about our realities also create them. They use speculative fiction to challenge normative knowledge production and cultural narratives. The binary categories that characterise our consciousness of ourselves and the world around us are disrupted through references and methods from science fiction, drag, Cantonese opera and popular culture. In Sin’s multifaceted world-building, characters, time, space, and narratives can behave with contradictions, mutations, transitions and glitches. The audience is invited to testimonies from spaces of liminality that go beyond gender and cultural dichotomies, between life and death, self and other, dream and awakening, fantasy and reality.

Sin’s cosmos is inhabited by enigmatic characters, some of whom regularly appear in different guises in various works. One figure that appears in several works at Accelerator is The Storyteller. In the role of a news anchor in Today’s Top Stories (2020), The Storyteller explains ‘In the end I can tell you that from the beginning there was neither beginning nor end just a becoming with then becoming apart then becoming with then becoming apart then (…)’. The main constant in the exhibition is change. Sin’s narrative is imbued with the possibility of changing reality through the performative power of storytelling.

About Sin Wai Kin

Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of existing between binary categories, their work realises alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.

The artist was awarded the 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2023 and was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize. The new work The Time of Our Lives will be shown in forthcoming solo exhibitions at Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects NYC and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong all in 2025.

Sin Wai Kin has held solo exhibitions and performances at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo(2024); Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2023); Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2023); Somerset House, London (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2020) Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2019), Serpentine Galleries, (London, 2019), and Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (2018).

Their work is held in several major collections, including the Tate Collection, the British Museum – Prints and Drawings Department, London; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.