Sin Wai Kin: It's Always You
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
March 1 - August 12, 2024
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents Sin Wai Kin: It’s Always You, a new solo exhibition of the work of one of the world’s most exciting visual artists.
It’s Always You, 2021, which the Buffalo AKG acquired in 2022, encourages viewers to reflect on the performance and commodification of identity in our present moment. The two-channel video work features a boyband of Sin’s construction in which they perform dressed up as each of the band’s four members—The Universe, The Storyteller, The One, and Wai King (a pun on the artist’s name). Each sways in slow motion against a greenscreen to a slow beating rhythm, alternately taking on the frontperson’s solo as they flirtatiously repeat the captivating lyrics.
The personalities that Sin deploys through each character developed out of their careful research into boyband culture, from late 1990s groups such as the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC to contemporary groups such as BTS and Mirror. The members of such bands are often marketed individually, creating distinct fandoms around each. This sociocultural phenomenon serves as the backdrop for the universal message of It’s Always You: that all gender in the social sphere is a staged performance. In addition to the video, the installation features framed “publicity” posters and life-size cutouts of each of the group’s characters, with which visitors are invited to pose and take selfies. By actively engaging with Sin’s work, the public plays along in the performance and commodification of gender identity—a role that offers a collective escape into a world that celebrates the diversity of all beings.
SIN WAI KIN (Canadian, born 1991) produces complicated fictions based on their own journey through the spectrum of gender identity. In their teens, they became interested in the Toronto drag scene but found true liberation in the fluidity of London’s thriving queer community and drag cabarets when they relocated there in 2009. Around this time, the artist performed as Victoria Sin, a drag character that exuded a larger-than-life female archetype. In the artist’s own words, through “a process of doing [female] drag and purposefully putting on a gender and then taking it off again,” Sin’s nonbinary identity was realized. These personal experiences inform their fantastical narratives, in which Sin aims to interrupt social norms around issues of desire, identification, and objectification.
BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222
