“My reality seems like a made-up fantasy for some people. We are living in a world where many different realities coexist”

Sin Wai Kin first made a name for themselves onstage during the early 2010s as Victoria Sin, a drag persona that turned up the dial on Marilyn Monroe’s Old Hollywood glamour and the impossible physical proportions of blowup dolls. There were prosthetic breasts, custom-built corsets and a huge platinum blonde wig that “looks like it ate your wig for breakfast”, as the character snipes in Define Gender, a 2017 film portrait of the artist. The makeup was just as big: Pierrot-white face, exaggerated black-and-red mouth and fake eyelashes to sweep the floor with. It was a striking parody of the blonde bombshell. As Sin reflects during a visit to their studio, “Within capitalism, extreme representations are always going to be more successful because they’re unattainable, and more polarised representations of things like gender become normalised. Drag is a purposeful doing of that, which also undoes it.” It’s an argument implicit in the iconic trans performer and Monroe-obsessive Amanda Lepore’s claim that she has ‘the most expensive body on Earth’. “How Lepore literally blows [gender] up is very attractive to me,” says Sin. “Like, ‘You want me to do this? Here it is.’”

What gave Sin a critical edge in London’s more experimental drag nights was that the performer then identified as a ‘femme-presenting cis-girl’, as they once put it, a ‘female’ drag queen. As an outlier in a scene dominated by white gay men, their position turned the dial on what it means to knowingly put on a gender. For Sin, a Canadian of Cantonese descent, these initial forays were born of the need to explore their relationship with Western femininity. In the four short films that made up Narrative Reflections on Looking (2016–17), their graduate presentation at London’s Royal College of Art, the camera moves up and down Victoria Sin’s adorned and displayed body, which is as still as a poster pinup but for the artist’s visible breathing. Sin’s voiceover describes uncanny encounters with a teasing image of a woman who gazes back and looks just like the narrator – or nearly: “It was like looking into a mirror and finding that there was something missing in the reflection”. The speaker’s desire to consume the image has both a sexual and cannibalistic dimension, and this goes both ways. “I was eaten alive,” they purr.

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