A woman lay on her side, à la Manet’s Odalisque, with magnificent swooping eyelashes, exaggerated make-up, and large voluptuous false breasts. She looked at me, as I looked at her. Slowly, I felt a kinship, like a mirror. There she was - me in fact - trying so hard to be perfect.

Look at her.

Look at the way that she’s laying there.

Look at the way her shoulder protrudes slightly

So that her clavicles are more visible

And her face seems a little to want to hide

Which makes her appear modest and coy.

…

Look at her,

Look at the way she’s laying there.

With her doe eyes

Her delicate nose

Her round cheeks

Her full lips

Her soft breasts

…

Look-

Her shoulder must be aching

At this point

In this moment

In this moment she is barely maintaining your facade of effortless perfection and in the next

she will surely fail.’ [1]

The search for feminine perfection is a profound source of tension and pleasure. Once upon a time, I had hoped to evoke Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Audrey Hepburn in A Roman Holiday, despite being neither blonde nor owning a custom wardrobe by Edith Head. Many women participate in the strictures set by the patriarchy, hoping to engender desire in men and envy in women, seeking their validation. A woman must be graceful, generous, learned, maternal, sexual, heterosexual, thin; god forbid we’re ever hungry, unless we can perform Madonna eating spaghetti in Dolce black lace; or unhinged, but then again, it’s sexy when a drunken Brigitte Bardot dances half naked on bar tables, right? The duality seems to set us up to fail. Sin draws your attention to this fantasy, inventing the character ‘Victoria Sin’ to perform contemporary femininity. In ‘A View from Elsewhere, Act 1, She Postures in Context’ (above) we watch Victoria Sin carry the weight of these many demands. The image is unsteady and precarious, distorted on the wafting sheets, presenting the fragility of gender performance. If I watch carefully, her delicious smile droops, the flicker of a sick grimace. The next second it’s gone, the smile is back, the mask is replaced.

This encounter in 2019 proved fatal. The crack in the mirror, the glitch in the system, the ever-so-subtle slippage between worlds, was enough to cast a spell of self-doubt. Suddenly I remembered the gender game I forgot I was playing. I began to question the rituals I’d learned, the mask I’d made for myself, my deftly woven costume that let me hide in plain sight. Sin Wai Kin’s work questions what we take for granted about how we perceive reality. They challenge the fixedness of our perception, and draw attention to the imagined boundaries of categorisation that give us an illusory sense of control over the free-flowing mercurial cosmic soup.

* 

“Victoria Sin” walks onto a stage in full drag, dressed in a bombastic bleach blonde wig, nude corset and suspenders, clad in a latex bodysuit wearing white ballroom gloves. Sin stands before an audience of white caucasian men, all looking up at this towering, sensuous, Chinese woman. A tinny record starts to play ‘Goodbye My Love’ by Taiwanese icon Teresa Teng 鄧麗君, the Queen of Asian Pop, and Victoria Sin lip-syncs a tale of separated lovers, a rubbery silicon nipple protruding from vast cleavage.

There is a poignancy about lip-syncing, a paradoxically voiceless act. Mimicking a beloved icon is an expression of adoration, devotion and a way to borrow stardom for a short while. Imitation or pretence allows the excluded to wear society’s inclusion for a night, and feel the ephemeral pleasure of acceptance. Sin mouths the sing-song melody with heartfelt fervour, though no sound escapes their lips. To watch Sin Wai Kin wear Jessica Rabbit - all legs, cinched waist and balloon boobs - is to watch an exaggerated version of what millions of women perform everyday. And there was something else - it looked like how I felt. The experience of belonging, and not belonging. Of yearning for inclusion and inherently failing. She will surely fail. A queer in Baywatch skin. An Asian in Caucasian garb. The stakes are even higher for immigrants who don’t perform their gender; there’s more at risk for those who can’t assimilate.

Sin Wai Kin discovered their own non-binary identity through performing drag, which increasingly crept into their work, first embodied in the luscious character Victoria Sin. In the last five years, more characters have emerged and Sin has built something of a universe, allowing them to explore the interrelationships between the characters and their identities.