“Every time I hear the story it changes a little,” Toronto-born, London-based artist Sin Wai Kin recites in Dreaming the End, the audiovisual artwork serving as the centrepiece to their new solo show of the same title. Launched on 3 May at Fondazione Memmo – an art institution housed in the Renaissance-style Palazzo Ruspoli, just minutes from the bustle of Rome’s Spanish Steps – the showcase beams the public into an oneiric dimension that makes way for new possibilities. “Dreaming the End channels multiple cycles of storytelling to convey the feeling of being trapped in mainstream narratives,” Wai Kin says. “Just like a dream, the video has no beginning nor end: its ever-flowing essence prompts us to think, ‘how can fantasy inform our idea of reality?’”
For Wai Kin, who cut their artistic teeth as a trailblazing force on London’s kaleidoscopic drag scene in the 2010s, dreams have always played a pivotal role in their work. “Snippets of dreams from the past echo in many of the scripts of my performances — they’re manifestations of my subconscious that speak of what was happening to me before I could find words to express it.” The same is true of drag, which, granting the artist a space outside of themselves to look at who they were from an objective lens, “helped me realise that I am not a woman and allowed me to shape new realities that I wanted to inhabit”, Wai Kin explains.
Having initially turned to drag to “blow up” western society’s toxic beauty standards through inflatable breasts, tight-fitting corsets, platinum wigs, and caricature-like makeup, in recent years the 2022 Turner Prize nominee has embraced a genderless understanding of the world around them. Today Sin Wai Kin relies on their personas to denounce the loss of meaning legitimised by our fixation with labels. “As a child, I always struggled with feeling like I was neither one thing nor the other,” Wai Kin says, reflecting on their upbringing as a Canadian of Cantonese descent. “We live in a culture that forces us to assimilate into boxes in order to experience the least amount of violence; Dreaming the End imagines scenarios you can engage with from your own unique perspective.”
Stepping into the room where their 20-minute-long video plays on loop feels like entering a dystopian universe of some sorts as Wai Kin’s alter egos take turns on the screen. Like all of their “masks” — which have so far taken the form of chameleonic drag queens and kings, intergalactic news reporters and queer boyband members — the protagonists of Dreaming the End fall outside of prevailing dichotomies. Neither male or female, good or evil, true or false, the characters stand for a notion of identity “in perpetual flux”. Confirming Wai Kin’s ability to navigate different mediums, their first Italian solo show reinterprets Rome’s centuries-spanning heritage through performance, film, sound, installation, and an exclusively crafted print publication.
“As my practice is grounded in storytelling, the construction of culture and identity; with its history-rich background, Rome felt like the perfect setting for my solo debut in Italy,” the artist says. Coinciding with Alessio Antoniolli’s first curatorial adventure at Fondazione Memmo, Dreaming the End emerges from years of creative dialogue between him and Wai Kin. Here, two of the artist’s recurring characters morph into as many figures, engaging the audience in an hallucinatory journey that carries as much of Fellini and Antonioni’s ethereal cinematography in it as the uncanny, disorienting feel of Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 cult classic Eyes Wide Shut.
Brought to life against the film’s grandiose Roman settings — from the gardens of Villa Medici to the interior of Palazzo Ruspoli and the monumental Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — its protagonists expose the limits of language through aphoristic back-and-forths addressing the influence that storytelling, body and self-consciousness hold on each other. “The story changes the body and the body changes the story,” visitors hear in the crucial scene of Dreaming the End. Pronounced by a statue of Janus, the Roman God of beginnings and endings, of transitions and dualities, the statement stresses how, despite the apparent staticity of words, “every story serves as an opportunity for things, and people, to evolve”, Wai Kin explains. While composed of the same chapters, no story will ever sound the same second time around. And that is because, rather than being set in stone, humans are porous and constantly moulded by the interactions they undergo.
Much like the locations that appear in the video, which bear the legacy of some of the most significant moments in Italian history, the aesthetic inspiration for Dreaming the End came from the artist’s exploration of Italian arthouse cinema, fashion and music. If sites like Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — whose construction was mandated by Mussolini ahead of the 1942 world exhibition as a symbol of fascism, Italian culture and its founding values — stand as an architectural reminder of the manipulative power of propaganda; with their transformative force, Italy’s artistic expressions, many of which arose with the end of WWII, confirm Wai Kin’s belief that art can open up the way for better futures. “The places that Alessio and I picked for the film share the idea that history is solidified into notions of ‘objective knowledge’ and ‘identity’,” they say. “With this show, we created a camp world where objectivity and subjectivity merge, unleashing countless, fragmented narratives.”
At once eliciting familiarity, marvel and displacement, Dreaming the End is a disruptive reworking of local pop culture. “Ahead of the making of the show, I watched a lot of Italian giallo films and 1970s classics as well as diving into the fotoromanzo genre: these kind of cheesy ‘photo comics’ that took Italy by storm in the second post-war period,” Wai Kin says. “It was all about trying to replicate their ‘told-untold’ narrative, which is of course visual, but in the case of giallo films, also greatly dependent on sounds.” From the editing of Dreaming the End to its horror-inspired plot and creeping soundscapes (“which I have taken from those movies, sampled and reinterpreted in an electronic way,” they add), every detail of their first Italian exhibition bridges what Antoniolli calls “the ever-evolving cultural atmosphere of Rome and the artist’s contemporary take on it”.
“In Dreaming the End, Wai Kin wears sculptural dresses designed by fashion pioneer Roberto Capucci, pieces directly inspired by the surreal designs of Cinzia Ruggeri, and creations by British-Chinese designer Robert Wun,” the curator says. Referencing the “transitional places” and majestic staircases recurring throughout the piece, the garments contribute its unearthly ambience. For the artist, the choice of costumes also served as an opportunity to weave their personal story into the work. “Robert Wun is an incredible designer whose background speaks to my Cantonese roots, while the black tuxedo I wear is actually a gift from my father,” they say.
In Wai Kin’s imagination, statues come to life to warn their alter egos of how, without people “embodying” them, even the most accurate stories seem meaningless. Spread across Fondazione Memmo, Dreaming the End’s accompanying installation feels like a shrine to the artist’s multifaceted genius. Welcoming visitors as they enter the space are posters inspired by the cover of Wai Kin’s own fotoromanzo which, replacing the traditional exhibition catalogue, translates its audiovisual centrepiece onto paper. Elsewhere, the four wigs worn by the artist are presented on busts in a square: placed all around and within it in concentric circles, eight face wipes still bearing the residue of their painted masks. Described by them Wai Kin and Antoniolli as “shrouds”, these makeup monoprints capture the power which lies in the ephemerality of performance while simultaneously representing the many disguises one takes on and off throughout their life. After all, as stressed in one of the existential sequences of Wai Kin’s film, “not one single day of our lives is not a play”.
“Sometimes the most personal experiences are the most universal,” they say. “The urge to escape into different realities away from arbitrary categories is something I feel deeply, but it also resonates with a whole generation of people wanting to expand the boundaries of their own experiences.” Abstracting the personal narratives that fuel their work through speculative fiction, the artist hopes that Dreaming the End “will hold up a mirror to visitors for them to be able to see themselves in it, suspending disbelief to unveil new ways of living through fantasy”. And if it is true that “daring to imagine a different reality is an opportunity to start building it”, as Antoniolli outlines in the exhibition text, then Dreaming the End is already a new beginning.
Sin Wai Kin’s solo exhibition, Dreaming the End, is on view at Rome’s Fondazione Memmo until October 29
Credits
All images courtesy of Sin Wai Kin