The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 7 with Sin Wai Kin
Artist Sin Wai Kin constructs fantasy worlds to show how storytelling doesn't just reflect reality—it creates it. Through characters like The Storyteller, and works that present us with newsreaders in parallel universes or boy band members embodying the marketed self, their practice threads the line between frightening and funny, stretching language to places where it becomes both meaningless and profound.
In this conversation with host Charlotte Burns, Sin Wai Kin talks about their creative process, their hopes of transforming the personal into the universal, and the power of art and imagination to create spaces of freedom.
Through the universes they create, Sin Wai Kin explores time, identity, and consciousness— inviting us to question the binary of reality and fantasy, asking: what if multiple things can be true at once?
What if we could imagine different ways of being in the world?
Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.
Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.
Photo credit: Aries Moses
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello, and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast which imagines new and different futures.
[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]
I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this time we’re talking to the visionary artist, Sin Wai Kin.
From boy bands to sitcoms, their multifaceted, unexpected approach to art challenges traditional narratives and explores new dimensions of reality.
Through writing, drawing, sketches, filming, and performance, their art explores themes of identity, desire, and consciousness. Through the universes they create, inviting us to question the boundaries between fantasy and accepted reality, asking: what if multiple things can be true at once?
What if we could imagine different ways of being in the world? And what if we could see the world for what it really is?
This is a conversation about performance and authenticity, about storytelling and the limits of human understanding.
I loved it and I hope you do too. Let’s get going.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Welcome, Wai Kin. Thank you so much for being here today. It's really a pleasure to talk to you. I appreciate you making the time.
Sin Wai Kin: Thank you so much for inviting me. It is my honor.
Charlotte Burns: Well, where to begin? You've said that you really want people to “exist in my world and see it as a new perspective.”
When you're creating these worlds, whether there is a specific type of audience that you have in mind, as we go into this podcast recording, I wondered if there was a specific kind of audience for this show that you have in mind?
Sin Wai Kin: When I think about audience for my work or for anything, I really hope that it's anyone and everyone. I really don't try to have a specific audience. I think that certain people are more drawn to my work, but what I'm trying to work through and these kinds of things that I'm trying to address really pertain to everybody.
Charlotte Burns: I wanted to ask you if there was a sort of dream viewer you're making this for? Someone who doesn't exist yet, someone from a different time, or maybe someone who would understand your work in ways that today's audiences can't quite grasp. Is there a future person, or is it a future self, maybe, that you're making this for, or a past self?
Sin Wai Kin: All of the above. I think that I make this work for my past self, for my future self, and I hope that the people who engage with my work see themselves in the work and see a future self in the work.
I think especially recently, I've been trying to make a lot of work that is dealing with change, like social, cultural, and personal change, and how those things interact, and so I am hoping that people are engaging with my work and like seeing how things could be different, and how they could be different.
Charlotte Burns: You’ve said that sci-fi and philosophy are helpful for you, in that they use fantasy narratives to help us understand what it means to exist in a world that is constantly changing, and part of the reasons that you construct fantasy worlds is because we live in a constructed reality. And so if you, in your work, lay bare a constructed reality, perhaps you offer your audience an opportunity to see how much choice we have in creating spaces that we didn't realize we could do before.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. So for me, speculative fiction and fantasy have been these incredible windows into possibilities that I couldn't see, like, at that moment, and they gave me this incredible thing, which was a different perspective to see myself and the world from, at the same time as providing a kind of escapism, and a kind of fantasy or a dream of what things could look like. As I've found that like reading works of science fiction or engaging with speculative fiction in various ways has been very transformative for me, like, I really hope that is also what my work does for other people.
Charlotte Burns: You're not the first artist on the show—and I'm sure you won't be the last—to talk about the influence of Octavia Butler, that she basically predicted in the ‘80s the world that we're in now, asking what if things don't change, rather than just what if things were different.
And this show, of course, is a ‘what if,’ and I wondered how Octavia Butler's approach to those ‘what if’ questions influenced your thinking about your own characters and narratives, and your own work?
Sin Wai Kin: Octavia Butler is one of these authors of a category of what you could call social science fiction that is asking really important questions that often are, yeah, ‘what ifs’. Again, like what if I was different? What if the world was different? And what Octavia Butler is asking in the Parable Series is what if things don't change, like from the ‘80s? And then she envisions, really uncannily, the world that we are in now.
So, that in itself is really powerful, that she just saw what was going on and followed that through into 2025. And here we are. There's something prophetic about that.
Charlotte Burns: Do you find that comforting or discomforting or both?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, definitely both comforting and discomforting. I like that there is something about fantasy and fiction that is real, or can be even more real than the constructed and socialized reality that we are given.
Charlotte Burns: Right, there's more space to feel freely and think freely there?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. To explore alternative narratives that maybe also exist but just are not socialized as true.
Charlotte Burns: Talk to me about that a little bit more.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. So, the Parable Series, I think that there's this, yeah, this interesting thing that's happening between fantasy and reality, and this is the path that, like engaging a lot with fantasy and speculative fiction has led me to, is to think about a lot of binaries that are socialized.
But I think the binary of reality and fantasy has become the kind of main one, especially in this kind of political moment, social moment that we are in, where, like, many different realities are existing at once, in this very polarized way, and are clashing in this very real way. So, it becomes, yeah, really important to look at what is what you're told is real, and who gets to say what is real or not.
And the act of storytelling becomes like an incredibly powerful and important act.
Charlotte Burns: You have in The Breaking Story (2022), it's a circular narrative, there's no linear narrative there. There's no beginning or an end. And it's this idea of exaggerated, sensationalized stories, these sort of over-the-top facial expressions to deliver tidbits of information. And like a lot of your work, it treads this line that's between frightening and funny. You take language and stretch it to a place where it's meaningless, but also profound.
I wanted to talk about that idea of that post-truth moment, that post-language moment that we're in because it seems related to, it's a media thing, and you are in media, but it's also a language proposition. The idea of news and the idea of information has been so stretched through this kind of shattered media landscape, and you pick that apart a little bit through your language and through the films and performances that you put into the world.
How far do you think that can be pulled apart? And talk to me about your process.
Sin Wai Kin: So, The Breaking Story is a work that features two characters. One called ‘The Storyteller’ and one called ‘Change’, and they both act as news presenters in these six different parallel worlds.
So, The Storyteller is a character that I made to think about the act of storytelling and how it not only represents but creates reality. The inspiration is, obviously, watching the news, and as I think we all have been in the past, I don’t know, five years, or for as long as I've been watching the news, like noticing that it's not about depicting the world as it is. It's not about sharing information. It's about constructing narratives, and so this character, these characters in the work, they say one thing and then they say the kind of opposite thing and present them as equally true as different perspectives.
And perspective has become, like, really important in thinking about narratives and like what is constructed and what's objective and what's subjective or what's framed as objective or subjective.
[Excerpt from The Breaking Story (2022).]
I think for a while I've been thinking about language, and the way that language is used is incredibly important in the news, or in any context, in framing perspectives. Language is not only the things we use to give shape to thought, they also shape thought.
There are ideas that are embedded within the English language, because the English language has been constructed along with all of the kind of systems of power that have shaped it and that it shapes: colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, et cetera. They're all reproduced at the same time as you speak. So, to be able to present language, but then also, like, really break it down so it becomes meaningless, is almost like a last resort, because I almost don’t know what else to do with it.
These are the tools that we've been given to express ourselves, to become ourselves within, and it's really hard to try to imagine a reality, or a way to express myself, that is outside of that.
Charlotte Burns: You grapple with that a little bit in Dreaming The End (2023), which opens with a book where the names and the nouns have been replaced with the word “name”. Which one critic called name-dropping in its purest form…
[Laughter]
It’s such a great line.
And the narrator sort of “name, name, name,” over and over again. This sort of absurdity of words and names is a point you get across really well, but you can tell really clearly you're someone who loves language. And you said your process starts with a script. You're obviously a committed reader, and I think that's a really interesting tension in the work. That this is the tool that you have, and you're grappling with its limits.
Do you find that gets easier through the work? Have you changed your process? Are you still very much committed to beginning with the language? Because obviously you're in film and performance, so you use all these other tools too.
How do you break that apart as best you can?
Sin Wai Kin: I still do start with language, with writing, usually with my work, and I guess, yeah, you're right, that is a little bit ironic. But language is not only the way that we have to express ourselves, but the way that we have to understand the world around us.
In that work, Dreaming The End, where The Storyteller’s defining what the narrative of the story is to the other character, and just saying the word “name”, I was trying to do that thing where you say a word over and over again, and then it starts to just fall apart, and you hear the kind of sound that it is and it becomes a little bit detached from its meaning. But also the fact that every word in language is a name, and every name is a kind of classification.
[Excerpt from Dreaming The End (2023)]
And that is the way that the human intellect functions, by categorizing things and classifying things and drawing a line around them in order to try to understand them. So, I was trying to, yeah, to undo that in this repetition of just the name. Somebody said at some point we cannot perceive something without classifying it.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, we have this sort of very quick filing system.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. And that's like something that we do in order to be able to move through the world and like function because if we took in everything that our senses gave to us all the time, then we wouldn't be able to do things sequentially: wake up, brush your teeth, go to work. But it also is a gross oversimplification of the world that we live in.
Charlotte Burns: We did a podcast this season with the artist Glenn Ligon, who talked about the words in his work and language in his work, and specifically the word “America” that he used as material. And the idea of using language as material.
And I wonder if that's a similar thing in your work, that language becomes a material?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, definitely.
From the beginning, I've been trying to unpick how deep our socialization goes and what is like at the bottom of that, or if there is a bottom to that. And language is definitely a very big part of that. Without language, we can't function. Language is the building blocks of narratives, and narratives are the way that we understand the world and ourselves and the relationship between those things.
Charlotte Burns: Let's talk about different formats because you experiment with popular storytelling forms as well, whether that's the sitcom in The Time of Our Lives, you create a sitcom where a kind of quasi-couple experiences major life events like a wedding, graduation, pregnancy, and death in a glitching timeline. Or It's Always You, where you have a boy band and you experiment with individualism, or the kind of marketed individualism of boy band members.
Those kind of popular presentations of individuals is something you seem to have quite a bit of fun with, playing around with. It's certainly fun to watch as you present to us these life choices. And there's profound things in there too. There's a lot of mansplaining going on, there's death, there's crushing realization of one's own existential mortality, but with canned laughter tracks and coordinated dance moves and six packs.
[Laughter]
Tell us about how you come to these formats.
Sin Wai Kin: I like to play with formats that have been embedded into my subconscious in some way. Like, definitely growing up, I was obsessed with boy bands. At the time, I thought I wanted to be with them, but it turns out that actually, I wanted to be them.
It was during the pandemic. I had just gone through a breakup. I had just chopped all of my hair off, and I became obsessed with listening to NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys again.
But yeah, it was interesting to me thinking about this kind of format because looking at how identity, personhood even, is constructed under capitalism, and kind of marketed back to us, how we are made to feel like we are not enough. And then, the enough that we seek is then sold to us as like an anxiety that we then have to purchase our way out of.Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: I was interested in this kind of, the idea of the individual in this kind of group setting, how identity was constructed within boy bands, how every member is, like, categorized or like pigeonholed. There's like the cute one, the sexy one, the slightly older one, and everybody is just one thing.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. And also the lyrics of that, it was so dark. I watched it with my nine-year-old daughter, who is really into KPop Demon Hunters, which is about a girl band versus a boy band.
Sin Wai Kin: Oh, I've seen that. I love that film. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: It's really good.
And she was really into your film, this projection of this incomplete self.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: And this idea of the sort of emptiness of this existential crisis that maybe you can buy a record, and you might feel a little bit more full, and the kind of staring into the camera that your characters do so well.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm-hmm.
Charlotte Burns: And they play the parts so convincingly. It’s a little dark, but in a very charming sort of way.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. The lyrics are, “It's always you.”
Charlotte Burns: “It's always you.”
[Excerpt from It’s Always You (2021).]
Sin Wai Kin: It's Always You (2021) is the name of the work. And they keep repeating this line, “It's always you. You're like infinity. You're the one, the one in me.” It's about this like incompleteness, but also like somehow reaching towards the realization that it is always you, you are you, but you're also everything else, all the time.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, so maybe there's more hope in there. Okay, that’s good.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. I think, you know, it's, it's, it's both.
Charlotte Burns: That's good. I was going to a dark place. I'm pleased that you took me out of it. [Laughs] It’s you, the boy band. I love that work.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: And The Time of Our Lives, a sitcom. You said that time is relative and everyone has their own experience of time. So, it's an illustration of how we have these different realities.
And you see that with this kind of couple, the proxy husband, the proxy wife, and they play this I Love Lucy trope where the husband comes in and the wife's at the table. She's asleep, possibly dead, and he sort of brushes that off, and it's the end of the world, possibly, and it's a countdown to that. And she is much more perceptive than he is. He refuses to acknowledge that, all the way through, until it starts glitching. And the husband character begins to understand that he's not been present for these major moments in his life, or maybe they weren't real, or maybe it's all collapsing, and has a kind of moment of breakdown.
And it's not clear that would ever stop. Or maybe it's just beginning, or maybe it's happening all over again. And meanwhile, there's the canned laughter of the audience, and their faces are brilliant, too, because they look bored, they look funny, one of them looks half asleep sometimes.
And so, talk us through making that sitcom.
Sin Wai Kin: I've been interested in reproducing, or performing, not only the characters, but like the entire medium of storytelling as it exists in, like, various forms in culture.
So, the boy band, music video, the TV show, the fragrance advertisement, and I really wanted to make this work, The Time of Our Lives, that demonstrated the audience and the relationship of the audience and the actors, which is something that is present in all of these kinds of forms of media. There's always an audience. It's always being constructed for an audience, but that's something that you don't necessarily see because you maybe are the audience.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: So, this relationship of audience and actors, I think it's maybe another binary that I'm trying to think about: the observer and the actor.
[Excerpt from The Time of Our Lives (2024)]
This work is on two screens, two large screens that are supposed to make you feel like you're in a life-size live taping of a science fiction sitcom. And you sit between these two screens. On one screen, behind you is the audience watching the sitcom, and in front of you is the sitcom. And you're made to think about your place, whether you're an audience, whether you're an actor, your place within these things, because every day we move through the world and we're very aware of being perceived. I think in a large part because of the way that narratives are fed to us in this kind of media-based culture.
Charlotte Burns: And we see ourselves on screens.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. And we identify with characters on screen, whether we're conscious of it or not. And we absorb narratives from the screen, whether we are conscious of it or not. And then we reproduce them.
Charlotte Burns: You've created a universe, essentially, a kind of parallel universe with a cast of characters, and some of them, like The Storyteller, inhabit multiple personalities simultaneously. Can you talk us through your process of developing those personas?
And I wonder if you have a soft spot for a particular character. Is there one that you like more than another? One that you punish more, give like the worst lines to? Do you try and treat them fairly?
Sin Wai Kin: Probably. I probably do have favorites, and they probably change over time.
In the process of constructing characters, usually there'll be something that I'm thinking about a lot, like a particular thing, like storytelling, and then I make a character called The Storyteller, whose main job is to be the kind of central character in narratives, which are trying to present, but also like deconstruct this idea of storytelling and show what it does. And so, probably that character is the character that has reappeared the most in different works, in different guises.
But, yeah, unconsciously, there are characters that tend to get punished a lot more in works. Yeah, maybe within The Time of Our Lives, the character who is the wife character, she gets the short end of the stick.
[Excerpt from The Time of Our Lives (2024)]
But that is a reproduction of the roles that I was trying to parody that exist. I mean, not even parody because I think a lot of sitcoms themselves are parodies. Just trying to reproduce and demonstrate these relationships that are created on screen. There's usually like a gorgeous wife and then just some guy.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
Sin Wai Kin: And she's framed as somebody who is not smart, who doesn't know what she's doing, and who is just very easily dismissed. But I think you mentioned that she might be more perceptive than the husband character, and I think that's true, and I think that's something that happens with people who experience that kind of treatment in their everyday lives.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, you feel this sort of sympathy for her, but she's the punchline. The husband character is, “you should stop and smell the roses”. He makes these sort of comments when she's trying to explain that she thinks the end of the world has happened, he sort…
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: …of dismisses her.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: You know.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. The relationship of the audience is really important because we exist in a world where, like, certain narratives or things that people say on TV or in an everyday context are reaffirmed by other people, and some things are not.
And that's really what I was trying to demonstrate is that we're actors in the world all the time.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.
Sin Wai Kin: And we are both perceiving ourselves and being perceived. What we do and who we are is shaped by the way that we move through the world, the way that other people perceive us, and the way that other people react to us.
You have actors who are definitely acting along a script, or maybe not, but that's implied. And then you have the audience as well, that is watching and reaffirming certain narratives that are being spun within the sitcom. And what you realize, in this kind of like live studio audience situation, is that the audience is also being queued, the audience is also kind of acting along a script.
Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We know the script, we know how to behave in those social circumstances.
Sin Wai Kin: Exactly. So, this thing of some people being actors or performing, and other people just observing, there is no such thing as anybody who is just an observer.
Charlotte Burns: When it comes to your work, thinking of audiences and audiences’ reactions, I was thinking of your work in parallel to the writers that you admire so much.
If you think of Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler, they write something, it goes out into the world, and people interact with it. With a lot of artists, especially film and video artists, there's a sort of limited audience in the sense that not everything lives totally freely on the internet.
How do you navigate your audiences—like, that broad potential public? And how do you feel when you've exhibited internationally? You've won significant recognition, major prizes, and so on. How do you navigate that level of recognition, and releasing work into the world and getting that reception back yourself?
Sin Wai Kin: It is, like, very informative. I often can't see the work myself. Not literally, but I can't see how other people will perceive the work because I'm so, like, literally inside of it. So, when I get the kind of feedback, like for example, with The Time of Our Lives, it was very interesting to see how people were perceiving it, like which characters they identified with, which was very varied—how people saw themselves in the work.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: I always try to, like, take that on board and use it to construct the next world, or the next work, better. Because my work is to hold an audience. I want people to be immersed in it. I want it to reach them and touch them. I want them to identify themselves within it. And, I think that's what a really good work of speculative fiction does. It's immersive, and it holds you for a moment, and it gives you another perspective, and then it lets you go back into the world that you're part of or that you think you're part of.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Let's talk a little bit about the carrier bag then, if your work holds that space. It's this idea that your work is a carrier bag, which comes from Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which is essentially the argument that most storytelling privileges the hero's journey, which is a linear, conflict-driven story, focusing on a hero who's a protagonist, often with a weapon, who kills or conquers or ultimately wins, which traces back to the first imagined tool, as a weapon, and a linear one, like a sword or a spear, which she says has become a tyrannical model for storytelling. She suggests that a carrier bag is a better template because it holds this space for so much more.
Can you talk about how you structure your works to function as carrier bags, and the kind of contradictions that you're interested in holding together in the same space, and explain, I think a little bit better than I have, what the carrier bag template can be?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, so the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction was a very influential essay for me, and even now, whenever I do tutorials with students, I always tell them to read it. Because it sets out a binary or two different models of storytelling.
One of which is the hero narrative, which uses a metaphor of probably the first tool that humans used. So, the first one, which is very popular, is the spear or the stick. A weapon that was like used to hunt, was a straight line that starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. And there's one character that uses it, conquers some kind of other. There is like one moral of the story to be learned, and it is like a very, yeah, didactic, simple, easy to digest, and often violent narrative.
Whereas she proposes that the first tool is probably the carrier bag, which was just for collecting a bunch of like oats and seeds and eating them later, or putting your baby in and carrying them around.
And this model of storytelling is one that can hold many different perspectives at once. It can hold things that contradict each other, even. There is room for many different characters, many different things to learn. It allows you to be immersed in the narrative and to make up your own mind.
And that was particularly interesting when I started to also do some research into general relativity and quantum entanglement, and time, the structure of time, because I felt that there are different ways to think about time and the way that humans have, and are socialized to think about time is this very linear narrative where there is a past, a present, and a future, cause and effect.
Whereas things are actually, we know, a little bit more complicated than that. And in The Time of Our Lives, I try to use this idea of relative time and the fact that we know that everyone has an individual experience of time to illustrate also the fact that everyone has an individual experience of reality.
[Excerpt from The Time of Our Lives (2024)]
And in fact, we know, again, in quantum entanglement that reality happens as we agree as to what it is, that even lengths of space and durations of time vary depending on who is looking, and by defining them, we change them.
This is also something I'm looking into right now in studies of consciousness and neuroscience, how we have, each, a very individual reality, that our worlds that we experience are almost like a controlled hallucination that is constructed based on all of our prior beliefs. Of course, the culture that we're part of, our biases. And again, reality happens when we agree on what that is.
And so, knowing that and looking at what's going on right now, I think there's so many possibilities and avenues for thought that are like opened up.
Charlotte Burns: Do you mean that there is such little consensus on reality right now, and that disagreement means that there are more possibilities for reconsidering the sort of basis of shared reality?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, I think that understanding that there's no such thing as objective reality. And people are so convinced that what they experience is true, and it's not that, it's not. It's just that multiple things can be true at once.
Charlotte Burns: It may not be true for someone else.
Sin Wai Kin: Absolutely.
Charlotte Burns: I was thinking about that in your work and this idea of the construction of reality and this idea that it is what we agree that it is, and that we're in a kind of contest right now for an agreement, or lots of different contests. And I was thinking, how many people do we need to agree that something becomes real?
In your work, if we're thinking about an audience, you do create multiple universes, and you invite people into those universes and you immerse them in those universes. And for a period of time, your desire is that universe is the universe that the viewer is in.
Do you need there to be consensus, or can it just be one person? If just one view is in that world and it's real for them, can that be real? Or does there need to be a kind of mass consensus? And what is the critical mass? What is the point of agreement that we tip over? Or is the singular reality of one person enough?
Sin Wai Kin: I think it depends on also who. As we're seeing right now, it's not a critical mass. It is a percentage of people that have resources and influence. I don’t know what the answer to that question is, like, politically, but I think, for the case of my work, if it's just me and one other person that's experiencing the work, and like in that moment they're convinced, then that's enough.
Charlotte Burns: Your first character was Victoria Sin, which was about unpicking your relationship with Western femininity, which you embodied and disembodied until you could understand what you wanted. And then in A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021), The Construct wears a wig made from your own hair that you'd grown for seven years, and then you would take on and put back off that wig. You said it created a weird space to be in.
Sin Wai Kin: Mmm.
Charlotte Burns: And I wanted to ask you what it was like to physically shed and put back on remnants of yourself and former self. And thinking back to Octavia Butler, you'd said the more personal, the more universal, there's something deeply personal about that. This is your own hair, this is your own parts of your own body, and your own personhood that you're experimenting with and bringing into your work. And, Victoria Sin initially wasn't in your work, and then became something that was part of your work and is deeply personal.
How does it feel to embody and disembody your selves and past selves in that way? And then how do you make something so personal more universal?
Sin Wai Kin: Very difficult questions. I think that, yeah, this note card that I read in Octavia Butler's archive, “the more personal, the more universal,” has really stuck with me. And that is why I continue to put and start from like extremely personal places in my work. If I am making work that is about change in relationship to a changing world, and I want to depict how difficult that is, I'm going to draw on my personal experiences of change.
And, yeah, with that wig that is made of my own hair, styled the way that I used to wear it for seven or eight years, that is a very deeply personal work. But it was, yeah, that I was trying to navigate the relationship between performance and authenticity, something that was, that that people recognized me by, this very specific hairstyle and…
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: …my hair, and turned something that was like, seen as like an authentic part of my identity, into a costume.
Yeah, this relationship of like self and former self and future self, even, is an important part of the work. And I think that, right now, I'm trying to think about how even beyond social binaries that exist, that are socialized, that are conditioned, even the idea of having a self at all is conditioned. The idea that there is like somebody inside of us, a self, like a soul that experiences all of these things in the world, a lot of different practices of spirituality, and also in kind of science of consciousness, we're realizing that the self itself is probably another construction that we believe is true, but actually doesn't exist. And realizing that is realizing the ultimate truth, is realizing nirvana, or however you want to describe it.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, I love this idea of putting on a costume. It's sort of like that weird feeling you get when you look at an old photo, an old profile picture, or something, and it's like looking back at an old friend or a stranger.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: And, well, understanding it's someone you used to know.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. There's this other idea that I've become really interested in that again is repeated in both like spiritual philosophy and neuroscience of this idea of the continuity of self that we have, which is essential for our ideas of, like, having a self is that we are the same person. Somehow, the person that we were as a child is the same person that we are now, is the same person that will be an old person. This is also probably an illusion. And in fact, in some ways, we like die and are reborn every moment. I mean, materially even, our cells completely change. Materially, we are not the same person every seven years or so.
Engaging in ideas of future past selves, when I was making that wig, I was trying to, like, take things away and see what is left. Take this thing that I was really, I was very attached to, this kind of long hair that I had that was like a very big part of my femininity, that I was often complimented on. And, yeah, it became a very big part of how I presented myself to the world. When I take that away, what's left?
I think that I try to keep doing that in different ways. Okay, I took off the costume, but maybe some other things are also still costume.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: Like, how much is left? And I feel almost that, that music video with it, is it Robbie Williams? Rock this way?
Charlotte Burns: Oh, when he strips his body off.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. He, like, takes off his clothes, and then he starts taking off…
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Sin Wai Kin: …his like flesh. That's how I…
Charlotte Burns: Rock DJ.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. [Laughs] That's how I…
Charlotte Burns: It’s so disturbing that video!
[Laughter]
Which is such a good comment on the pop industry and how it wants to eat you alive.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: But also like completely of that moment too. I don't think you could make that video now.
Also amazing that you kept that hair. Like, often when you shed a self, it's shed, it's gone, and you have to find documentary evidence. So, to keep a physical object is an artistic impulse.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, well, I still have it, I still show it. It is like an artwork in itself. It's called Costume for Dreaming (2021). And it's in my studio at the moment. I actually put it on for the first time in years, a few weeks ago. And, you asked how it feels to embody and disembody and…
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. How did that feel?
Sin Wai Kin: I, I dunno if I have a better word than weird.
Charlotte Burns: Well, I think that's a great word. Weird holds a lot.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Recently, I turned on the shower in New York, and New York water has a specific smell to it when it comes out the pipes. And you know, those paper chain dolls?
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: And I had this sensation of every previous Charlotte that had stood under a New York shower.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: And thought about the day ahead.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: And all the Charlottes that were gonna stretch forward and think about the day ahead, and the hopes and the victories and losses that all those paper dolls had experienced, and those New York mornings, and thought that's all we sort of are, stretching through time.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: As much time as we get.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. Your past self and your future self are deeply connected to your present self. How you remember yourself in the past shapes how you'll be in the future. There's that like continuity of self again.
Charlotte Burns: One of the things I wanted to ask you is, The Fortress, that begins with these words:
[Excerpt from The Fortress (2024)]
I love the way in which it sounds like if you read the script, it sounds very certain, but the audio sounds like someone rehearsing a line.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: To sound certain.
But I thought, well, what if the stories we tell at this moment in time become the tools, become the only tools, that future generations have to understand reality? And what if your personal narrative told from your specific place becomes that foundational knowledge system for future generations? What would you make next?
Sin Wai Kin: Um, I want to make a work that is about like a paradigm shift.
Charlotte Burns: Which one, which paradigm shift?
Sin Wai Kin: Like the, all of it, because I think all of the, all of the belief systems that we have, again, all of these like systems of power that we exist within our, are the same thing. The history of capitalism is also the history of colonialism is also the history of patriarchy.
Charlotte Burns: Do you think we're in a paradigm shift, or you're fantasizing about one?
Sin Wai Kin: It's hard to say if we are. I mean, I definitely think that I live in a different paradigm from a lot of people in the world. I don't know, there is a kind of in that work, The Fortress, this character who is rehearsing and then performing in order to become this classification of man, then finds themself in this kind of dream world, as another character, as The Mask.
And The Mask is actually the illustration, the painting on this character's face is actually of an unmasking, of a mask being lifted, which is very inspired from Sufi poetry, in particular Rumi’s Mathnawi. This idea that the ego is something that keeps us from the divine, or I think I read into that the universe.
And so right now I'm trying to make works that are about this unmasking of a kind of, like I want to bring about a bit more of a humility because I think that the exceptionalism of humans, and in particular some humans, have led us here.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: And it's not only in media narratives, it is also the history of science.
Like, we literally at some point thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. And we also thought that any animals that weren't humans weren't conscious and were just like beast machines with no feelings or couldn't experience suffering. And even though we know those things are not true like, somehow the feeling of those things still really exists everywhere.
Charlotte Burns: There’s a residue, yeah.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. Is like what our scientific knowledge is constructed on even after we realized that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, we were like, “Oh, no. Like the sun is the center of the universe, but still, our solar system is still the center of the universe.”
And all of ecology, geology, this age of, like, anthropocentrism, it's about us, and our relationship between us and everything that's not us.
So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it is about some kind of paradigm shift, some kind of unmasking, some kind of taking off this like costume, and then seeing that actually it's like elephants all the way down.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
I was listening to an artist talk last week, and they were talking about working with clay because they like working with clay because it's from the earth, which is essentially bodies and decomposed matter, and if you're eating off a clay plate, that's what you're eating off. And I was like, “Oh, never really considered that.” I just hadn't really thought about that, and it sort of rejigged something in my brain, and oh, I think I'd been sort of doing that thing of going, it's just a thing that's appeared in front of me.
So yeah, I do know what you mean. Guilty as charged.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So, let me ask you some ‘what ifs.’ What is the what if that gets you out of bed in the morning, and the one that keeps you up at night?
Sin Wai Kin: That's really hard. Like what if things are not the way that I think they are? And then what is it?
I don’t know, right now, the ‘what if’ that I'm having fun playing with is, what does the real world like, what is that like? Because everything that we experience in the world is like through our human perceptions, which are so narrow.
For example, we see everything in color, but color doesn't exist in the world. It's just like the quality of how something reflects light. And that only happens when our mind processes the sensory signals that we're given. So, there's not actually any color in the world, or in a world that is independent of, like, human perception. And even the color that we see is such a tiny spectrum of light that exists in the world. So, that really demonstrates how little we can perceive and then understand. So, like, what is that? What is actually out there?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. What if you could see it all?
Sin Wai Kin: What if you could see it, but what does that even mean to see it?
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Sin Wai Kin: If we're thinking about outside of human perception.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
Sin Wai Kin: Experience.
Charlotte Burns: What if you could perceive it all?
Sin Wai Kin: What if you could experience the world as it is?
Charlotte Burns: What if you had to carrier bag big enough, [Laughs] I suppose, to hold all of the things.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess the thing is, one day we will experience it, but there will be no self to experience it.
Charlotte Burns: How?
Sin Wai Kin: When we die.
Charlotte Burns: Oh.
[Laughter]
Oh, we went there.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah. Sorry.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, okay.
So wait, is that the one that motivates you to get up, or is that the one that keeps you up at night? Are they the same thing?
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah, maybe both. What is the world actually?
And then maybe also, yeah, how, if our perception is like so both narrow and malleable, what are the different possibilities of our perceptions of the world, of our subjective experience in general?
Charlotte Burns: Do you find that the art industry is a supportive one to be in? Is that where you find the most freedom?
Sin Wai Kin: Well, it's difficult because I haven't really tried to make film in a commercial setting, but I imagine that there is a lot less freedom. I mean, I would love to one day make works that exist on platforms that have much wider audiences, but I definitely do… I'm very privileged to be able to just imagine something and then make it into something that exists in the world.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. You're proof that, what if you could imagine something and make it happen.
Sin Wai Kin: Mm.
Charlotte Burns: Okay. So, what if you could give some advice to your younger self? What would it be? I know we're not sure if they exist, but if they did, and if your future self did, what advice would you give those selves?
Sin Wai Kin: To my younger self, it would be to have less fear. I mean, it's terrible advice because how do you just tell somebody to have less fear? I think I would just try to tell them to have more confidence in their ideas and their perspectives.
Charlotte Burns: Mm.
Sin Wai Kin: And I think I want advice from my older self. Like, I don't know what to tell them. They should tell me. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: How can you do that? Can you imagine that?
Sin Wai Kin: I think I had a dream about it once.
Charlotte Burns: What happened?
Sin Wai Kin: I had a very vivid dream. I had this very clear sense that I was like my older self in some kind of apocalypse, and I could see myself in the mirror, and I knew that I was going to die soon in the dream, and I just wished that I had spent more time being present and like appreciating, being embodied in the world.
Charlotte Burns: Well, I think that's your advice.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: Be present.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah.
So, what if you were more present? I guess you would make more work, probably?
Sin Wai Kin: Probably I would make less work.
Charlotte Burns: Oh, well, okay, good.
[Laughter]
So, I should let you go, to go and be in the world. Yeah, you're right, actually, quite right. Make less work, be more.
Sin Wai Kin: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: Well, thank you so much for all of this. It's been so interesting to talk to you. I've really enjoyed it.
Sin Wai Kin: I just want to say thank you for having me. It's, yeah, it's been a really nice conversation.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Wai Kin.
Join us next time when we’ll be talking to a special returning guest, the legendary museum director, Glenn Lowry, who spoke to me during his final week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Glenn Lowry: Right now, today, in this country, we are experiencing a sea change in expectations and attitudes around what we do, for whom we do it, and how we perform it, if you want to look at it that way.
And so, understanding what the risk is to anyone's specific program and taking the actions required to either avoid that risk, mitigate that risk, or meet it head on, understanding what the consequences are, are the critical issues that every institution has to face.
Charlotte Burns: It’s an unmissable show. Tune in.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman& and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @schwartzman.art.