For Sin Wai Kin, drag clubs were art school

There aren’t many artists who’ve made their way from the basement of The Glory to the shortlist of the Turner Prize, but for Sin Wai Kin, the iconic LGBTQ+ venue in East London was a lesson in performance and theatre. “I don’t have any formal theatrical or performance training,” Sin tells me over Zoom from their Somerset House studio as a life-sized cardboard standee of themselves looms in the background. Just a few days ago, their latest exhibition, ‘Portraits’, opened at London’s Soft Opening. “I started doing drag in 2012 and I think the first time I did it publicly was 2013.” In the ten years since that first performance, Sin has become one of the few to successfully meld the worlds of drag and art.

‘Portraits’ was originally displayed over the summer at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel, where it won the Baloise Art Prize. The exhibition consists of five screens of continuously-looping video portraits in which Sin portrays different characters. As part of their “ongoing project of using drag as a medium to embody speculative fiction,” Sin embodies different full-body personas that subtly reference notable portraits throughout the history of art, encompassing the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Caravaggio, Man Ray and the Ming Dynasty-era artist Lu Zhi.

“I chose them all for different reasons that I felt lined up with the ethos of each individual character,” Sin tells me. So, for example, the piece known as The Construct is a play on Man Ray’s Kiki with African Mask (1926). “The Construct is a character that’s thinking about a binary of good and evil or victim and villain through a feminine lens. And Man Ray’s Kiki with African Mask is a work that, to me, speaks to exoticisation and othering. I wanted to think about how in these kinds of binaries – of good and evil, or victim and villain – we identify with one or the other, where, really, the reality is both and all.”

The Portraits series feels like a synergy of all of Sin’s work to date, bringing in ideas of drag, performance, video and the history of art. It is also their first solo UK exhibition since being nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize for their work A Dream of Wholeness in Parts. I wonder how such a prestigious honour could change the life of a young artist. “I mean, institutional validation in the art world changes things for sure. Obviously, having the attention of the biggest art event in the UK meant that people who maybe don’t always engage with art heard about me for the first time and I think it’s been great.” On average about 1,000 people visited Sin’s Turner Prize show each day. It’s a far cry from the crowd you can fit into the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, but London’s drag scene is still very much at the heart of Sin’s practice.

Starting in 2014 as their character Victoria Sin, they became something of a fixture on London’s drag circuit. Their CV of regular performance venues is a whistle-stop tour of the 2010s London drag scene: The Glory, Bar Wotever at the RVT, Duckie, Vogue Fabrics, Her Upstairs in Camden (R.I.P.), Dollar Baby at Metropolis and, naturally, dancing on the bar of Dalston Superstore.

“In terms of making me the artist I am now, [the London scene] formed me as a performer. I remember the first time I did a performance, it was in the basement of The Glory and I was so scared. It took a lot of nerve, to be honest. But through performing so regularly for years I was able to build my competence as a performer and really become the artist that I am.”