The End Time!
Sin Wai Kin
January 31 – March 29, 2025
Opening Friday, January 31, 2025, 6-8pm
Free RSVP
Sin Wai Kin’s The End Time! marks the U.S. debut of their newly commissioned science fiction sitcom, The Time of Our Lives (2024). Blending speculative fiction with daytime TV, the film explores theories of space-time, quantum entanglement, and subjective reality. The exhibition also includes the project Essence (2024), in which the character Wai King becomes a brand ambassador for a men’s cologne featured in The Time of Our Lives. Presented together for the first time, The Time of Our Lives and Essence act as connected explorations of Sin’s elaborate world-building, featuring enigmatic characters that regularly appear across Sin’s works. Combining moving image and installation, The End Time! draws upon Sin’s interests in science fiction, drag, Cantonese opera, and popular culture to challenge binaries that shape our personal identities and lived realities.
In the two-channel installation The Time of Our Lives, a sitcom is projected onto one screen and a “live” audience on the other, with viewers situated in between as both spectators and inhabitants of Sin’s fictional world. A day in the home of a wholesome American couple—V Sin and Wai King—unfolds on screen, but quickly devolves into an indefinable time with a circular chronology. Moments from the couple’s life are collapsed across past, present, and future, glitching between their wedding, graduation, pregnancy, and death. The characters jump forward and backward through a nonlinear time, from a bucolic idealization of the past to a desolate post-apocalyptic future, while a doomsday clock harkens the present end of the world. Every now and then their TV switches on by itself and The Storyteller interrupts to remind viewers of the ways that we are conditioned to experience time. V Sin and Wai King question their own experiences of time and memory against a shattering world where cause and effect are blurred. The film is accompanied by objects and props from The Time of Our Lives: the iconic wigs of V Sin and Wai King, a smashed vase, and a discarded heel bring Sin’s world into conversation with our own.
Presented as a commercial break within The Time Of Our Lives, the series Essence is displayed alongside its titular cologne bottle on a nearby pedestal. Wai King, representing an exploration of unbridled masculinity, takes on the role of a brand ambassador for Essence. He is pictured deep in thought, riding a horse in a rural Arcadian landscape. Evoking a journey of self-realization, the cologne’s tagline—“Your true self awaits”—suggests that Essence itself holds the answer to what is intrinsic to our nature. By displaying the bottle as a prop on a pedestal, Sin gestures towards the commercialized structures of identification and desire of the fantasy, as with many consumer products, that Essence represents.
Sin’s vivid, extravagantly-styled worlds exemplify a commitment to storytelling and the power of language to not only convey our realities but also construct them. Unfolding across temporalities, characters, and worlds, The End Time! directs our attention towards the many dichotomies that underpin our being—life and death, personal and universal, actor and audience, dreaming and waking—while offering us the possibility of defining our own reality beyond them.
Special thanks to the crews, production team, collaborators, commissioners and all those involved in the creation of the works (full credits for each project below)
Sin Wai Kin’s new video work The Times of Our Lives (2024) is initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects and Blindspot Gallery, and supported by Vince Guo.
Sin Wai Kin - The Time of Our Lives (2024)
Initiated by Accelerator and co-produced with Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects, and Blindspot Gallery, supported by Vince Guo.
Producer Samantha Wolf
Producer Maya Dufeu
1st AD Ffion Kunz at Callbox
2nd AD Morris Pusey at Loop Talent
AD Runner Anna Saracka
Director of Photography Rosie Taylor
1st Assistant Camera Lucie Seymour at Suz Cruz
2nd Assistant Camera Chloe Goument
Gaffer Hollie Mapp at Loop Talent
Spark Luke Makepeace
Spark Bert Hurtado
Spark Rufai Ajala at Loop Talent
Sound Leon James Radschinski
Stock music by POND5
Stylist Matt King
Stylist Assistant Fraser Kenneth
Makeup Assistant Luke Slyka
Hair Stylist Shunsuke Meguro at Future Rep
Hair Stylist Assistant Motoharu Iwaizumi
Production Designer Fillo Deportaberta
Production Design Assistant Maria Abad
Production Design Assistant Molly Bonnell
Production Design Assistant Knives
Casting Director Gemma Gurvitz at Talent Talks
Medics GWAS Ambulance Group
Catering Honey and Thyme
Camera rental Pixipixel Rental
Limited Lighting rental SHL London
Edit Producer Naike Mabois-Thomas at Avenues
Assistant Editor Matthew Dilworth at Avenues
CGI producer and agent Charlotte Öström at CharlieCharlie Agency
CGI post-production Double Up Studio
Colour Producer Alex Carswell at Electric Theatre
Colourist Andi Chu at Electric Theatre
Graphic Designer Aries Moross
Extras:
Carl Murphy
James Wright
Luke McInroy
Aurore Roussel
Natacha Sleiman
Richa Prakash
Sheila Glass
Valerie Hazan
Anna Eliseeva
Carrie Au
Chi Wong
Esha Jass
Harry Whittaker
Hilary Whelan
Ian Dayang
Jeannette G Davidson
Joseph McCorriston
Joseph Simpson-Bushell
Louise Prince
Lydia Ademoroti
Martin Mainini
Saffron Roberts
Simon Richardson
Vinita Satchit
Wai Mun Tsang
Sin Wai Kin - Essence (2024)
Commissioned by Soft Opening supported by The Gallery.
Director of Photography Joshua Fay and Sophia Al Maria
Animal Handler Stella Fauré
3D Design Yianni Papanicolaou
Graphic Design Aries Moross
Typography Giulia B.
Sound Mix Leon Radschinski-Gorman Colour Grade Andi Chu
Image Retoucher for poster Joseph Hunter
Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.
The artist is nominated for the 2024 Jarman award for their film works Dreaming the End (2023) and The Breaking Story (2022). They were the recipient of the 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2023 for their film series Portraits (2023). Their film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, and included in the touring exhibition the
British Art Show 9, as well as being screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Accelerator, Stockholm (2024); Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2024); Canal Projects, New York (2025); Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2025). Recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2024); Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2023); Dreaming the End at Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2023); A Dream of Wholeness in Parts at Soft Opening, London (2022); It’s Always You at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2021).
Group exhibitions include Lahore Biennale 03, Lahore (2024); Greater Toronto Art (GTA24) at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; CUTE at Somerset House, London (2024); After Laughter Comes Tears at Mudam, Luxembourg (2023); Turner Prize 2022, Tate Liverpool, (2022); MYTH MAKERS — SPECTROSYNTHESIS III, Taikwun, Hong Kong (2022); Drawing Attention at The British Museum, London (2022). Sin’s work is held in the collections of Tate Collection, UK; The British Museum Prints & Drawings; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art, UK; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.
