Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives
Blindspot Gallery, 15/F, Po Chai Industrial Building, 28 Wong Chuk Hang Rd, Wong Chuk Hang, until 10 May
After a whirlwind couple of years, which included a Turner Prize nomination, Sin Wai Kin is having their second solo exhibition, The Time of Our Lives, at Blindspot Gallery. Continuing the artist’s longstanding practice of upending established gender narratives, the exhibition features recent video works alongside Sin’s signature face wipes, which are imprinted with the make-up of the different characters the artist plays in films.
Highlights include the titular, two-channel video The Time of Our Lives, featuring Wai King, the heartthrob archetype, and V Sin, the hyper-femme, blonde drag queen, who play a stereotypical all-American couple. Set up as a “sci-fi sitcom”, the work presents a day in the life of the couple with no linear sense of the past, present or future.
“I draw from many sources, blending them with fantasy, science fiction and personal narratives to try to tell a story of what is going on in the world,” Sin says, adding that Sufi poetry, quantum entanglement, general relativity, Taoist allegory and post-colonial perspectives on anthropocentrism are among the topics informing the works on view.
Sarah Sze
Gagosian, 7/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder St, Central, until 3 May
The artist Sarah Sze’s father, the architect Chia-Ming Sze, taught her about perspective, pointing out for instance that architecture is built to human scale. “When creating outdoor work, the sky is literally your competition. If you take all the architecture out of a city, we’re just scaled to nature,” Sze tells The Art Newspaper. “This is also why Hong Kong is really interesting [to me], because the architecture is scaling itself to nature, but also growing alongside it. It feels like a natural form—like a crystalline.”
Sze encapsulates the city’s signature flux—all of its contrasts, contradictions, convergences of nature and man-made architecture, and constant movement—in a new body of paintings and sculptures included in her first solo, self-titled presentation in Hong Kong at Gagosian gallery.
Housed in Pedder Building, a recognisable colonial-era structure in the heart of the city, Gagosian’s high-ceilinged space encases Sze’s paintings, which line the walls, while the sculptures, composed of numerous fragments of pigment prints, are pieced together and hung on chains in formations that appear to be suspended in the air, drifting slowly to create a sense of movement.
A photograph by Sheba Chhachhi taken in Karol Bagh, New Delhi, around 1980–81.
Courtesy the artist
In Our Own Backyard
Asia Art Archive, 11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, until 30 August
With In Our Own Backyard, the Asia Art Archive (AAA) explores the role artists have played in South Asian feminism through the personal archives of the artist-activists Lala Rukh (1948-2017) and Sheba Chhachhi (b. 1958). The Pakistani multimedia artist Rukh and the Ethiopian-born Indian photographer Chhachhi were active in and documented the formative years of the region’s women’s movements starting from the 1980s. They explored gender and society using genres including theatre, video and screen-printing along with “ephemeral materials like posters, booklets and songs” that “engaged with a broad public and made a lasting impact”, say the curators Özge Ersoy, Sneha Ragavan and Samira Bose in a statement. “Their works transcended national borders, urban-rural divides and the traditional concepts of authorship.”
The project continues the non-profit’s long-running engagement with women and gender diversity, as well as with community histories. “As part of this initiative, we aim to acquire, digitise and circulate archives from women artists, collectives, movements and organisations, with a focus on those with significant participation of women practitioners,” the curators say. “At AAA, we are particularly interested in artists who take on multiple roles as educators, writers, documenters and organisers.”