Time’s a Drag

When approaching Canal Projects in New York, posters of Essence, 2024, Sin Wai Kin’s pastiche of a perfume ad, come into view. Wheat-pasted around the gallery’s exterior, they hint at the ontological dilemmas within. “Your True Self Awaits,” the text declares—and its enticing vagueness is the point. There’s a bit of Barbara Kruger in the message’s simplicity, but without the in-your-face irony of an accompanying image. Instead, Sin’s poster depicts an airbrushed photo of Wai King, a recurring masculine archetype in their work, gazing wistfully out into the distance. Sin’s debut U.S. show “The End of Time!,” features a cast of characters all played by the nonbinary artist. As Essence’s brand ambassador, the pink-haired Wai King is a makeshift conduit for the consumer to manifest their dreams and desires through. His rugged masculinity is seemingly up for purchase inside.

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In one corner, sprayable bottles of Essence are displayed on a single white pedestal. The glass flacons gleam in the light, distracting from the fact that the “fragrance” only consists of perfumer’s alcohol. The decision to keep the spray scentless highlights the ephemeral nature of scent itself: The commercial significance of any perfume is not derived from its physical qualities, but from what it evokes in the consumer’s imagination. A 30-second commercial features Wai King riding a horse through a field during golden hour. “What are you looking for?” asks a voice, referring to the hero’s journey towards self-discovery. Here, Sin is not just deconstructing the scent’s empty commodification. In mimicking the aspirational language of luxury advertising, they probe at the perfume ad’s vacuous heart to examine how its fantasy—and by extension, the self—is constructed.  

The audience’s role migrates from passive consumer to active spectator as the exhibition progresses. An advertisement for Essence plays during a commercial break for the two-channel video The Time of Our Lives (2024), a soapy sitcom starring Wai King and V Sin as a married couple bantering in their Space Age-style living room. The furnishings are minimalist but vaguely futuristic, as are their clothes and hair. Wai King wears a gray-ish pin-striped blazer that emphasizes their broad shoulders, while V Sin is dressed like a pin-up model in a low-cut white top, tan thigh-high stockings, and Pleaser heels. Viewers are invited to sit on a bench between two screens, one of the sitcom and the other of a recorded studio audience, reacting “live” to the couple’s charades. These televised spectators are also actors following on-screen cues. The set-up thus sandwiches the viewer in a contextual conundrum: As audience members, are we also actors, abiding by an invisible script? 

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“Do you ever have the feeling you are living in someone else’s dream? That time is passing over you,” Wai King remarks. The apparent artifice of The Time of Our Lives invites the viewer’s skepticism of the narrative function of time, which is revealed to be a malleable punchline. Wai King and V Sin are utterly confused, temporally catapulting from their wedding day to Wai King’s graduation to V Sin’s pregnancy to, finally, the encroaching Singularity that threatens their existence. A doomsday clock ticks on in the background. Throughout, a storyteller routinely breaks the fourth wall to discuss the temporal chaos at hand. 

On my first visit, I became so absorbed by the sitcom that I nearly forgot about the audience. But even when facing away from the faces on the screen, I found myself smiling in conjunction with the laugh track. When viewed in tandem with the sitcom, the constructed live studio setting scrambles the conventional artist-viewer dynamic, extending the work beyond the screen. We are encouraged to situate ourselves in the action and, as a result, alter our perception of time, depending on who we’re watching. Perpendicular to the two-channel video is a tableau vivant of V Sin, a close-up “still” from the sitcom framed by three circular light-boxes: past, present, future. Sometimes, the past and future are concurrently switched on, as the light-boxes flicker through the intervals. On my second visit, I sat facing the light-boxes, listening to the sitcom, letting the present flow past.

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Sin is interested in performance as a part of human disposition, though it would be reductive to call them a performance artist. Born in 1991 in Toronto, the London-based artist has cultivated a distinct interdisciplinary practice, combining performance, moving image, sculpture, and writing to create fantasy worlds that upend popular social convention. While Sin physically inhabits their on-screen characters, their body is not so much a canvas—drag is just one aspect of their practice—as it is a functional apparatus for meaning-making. World-building is often employed to describe these creative articulations, a term I’ve begun to negatively associate with franchise-style expansion. Rather, Sin strives towards a subversive mythopoesis: They fashion their own myths and shatter narrative objectivity, instead of scaling their world for commercial gain.

A story might “[come] to an end, but not the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance,” the late art critic Arthur Danto wrote in his seminal 1996 essay “The End of Art,” which Sin’s exhibition title recalls. The Time of Our Lives dwells on this “post-narrational insignificance;” in the sitcom’s circular chronology, its beginning feeds into its end. But narrative objectivity, while actively questioned, is never dismissed as insignificant in Sin’s practice. “The End of Time!” gels together familiar forms of commercial media to ambitiously steer the audience towards its philosophical preoccupation: What is the relationship between time, reality, and the self? Is there an objective truth we can attach ourselves to? 

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These questions might seem more suitable for an undergraduate philosophy course than an art exhibition, but Sin’s approach is lighthearted and deceptively playful. Any heady ideas are grounded in ready-made commercial vernacular. To call Sin’s work entertaining might come across as glib, but the artist succeeds in both engaging and persuading viewers to think critically about the roles they inhabit and the masks they wear in their daily lives—to question the forces that condition and collapse their identities into fixed little boxes. What I like best about “The End of Time!” is the directness of Sin’s endeavor. They are eager to wade through the metaphysical muck that gives shape to our daily activities. In rendering time absurd, we can recognize its contextual significance and dispense ourselves of its illusions. It’s a delicate act of disclosure. Sin is getting at the way constructed narratives, including time, try to box us in. This is, in many ways, as timeless a subject as anything.

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Sin Wai Kin: “The End of Time!” is on view until March 29 at Canal Projects in New York.