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.