Lasting Impressions

I am often met with confusion around these artworks – questions about what they are and how they are made. I have described them as drawings or paintings, as that’s part of their process, but essentially they are monoprints: each printing plate is the end of a character I have painted onto my face and performed, which is then pressed into a wet facial wipe. The result is a kind of death mask, which also contains my sweat, my skin cells, and sometimes my tears.

The first ever character I performed was a site to negotiate my relationship with Western femininity. They were a bombastic blonde bombshell whose skin and hair were a shiny, luminescent white. Each time I painted their face onto mine, I brought something I had been socialised to aspire to, to the surface of my skin. When I wiped it off at the end of each performance, they would look back at me from my facial wipe and ask: ‘What is left?’

This practice of bringing something to the surface, performing it purposefully, wiping it away, and then renegotiating what it means, persists in my work to this day. I see my use of makeup and costume as an embodied form of speculative fiction, a view from elsewhere to look at the relationships present in our everyday lives and ask: ‘How could things be different?’

My practice now hosts many characters, each one focusing on a different area of research, or a different binary, that I want to look at closely. Two of my face wipe works in Tate’s collection, titled You have not been given the words to describe how multiple yourselves are 2019 and Dragon Woman 2019, show two sides of one character called The Construct, who I use to think about the binary of victim and villain. Their faces are inspired by the Dan, the name given to leading female roles in Peking and Cantonese opera. Meanwhile, Maybe once you were a planet 2019 contains an early version of a character I now call The Universe, who I use to think about the binary of an individual and their context: how every individual is a reflection of the environment in which they are produced, and how, together, an individual and their context make up a whole. Separating the two is a matter of perception.

The Universe’s face is inspired by the Jing role in Peking and Cantonese opera, who is often a warrior, a god, or a supernatural being. Jing are typified by a vibrantly painted face which is pictorial and tells a story in itself. In this case, I painted the story of an individual flower in the context of the landscape in which it grows. It blooms over the third eye, its leaves cover the eyes, the stem flows down the nose, and the roots wrap around the mouth. The design is a meditation on the experience of the senses as a dream that we will wake up from. Behind the distant mountains you can see a celestial body rising or setting in the sky. All of these bodies – from the individual flower and the land on which it grows to the cosmos in the distance – together form The Universe. Whichever detail is perceived as reflecting the essence of the individual becomes a matter of perception. The same goes for the faces of The Construct: whichever one is deemed the character’s real face depends on the circumstances, and from which vantage point, you encounter them.

Thinking through embodied forms in this way has become so central to my practice as I believe no concept is abstract. There is nothing that humans do not experience through the senses, through the physical within the social body. With each character I create, I attempt to delve deeper into the question of what is mine and what was given to me as the result of my environment. With each mask I remove,I come closer to what’s left.

^{Dragon Woman, Maybe once you were a planet and You have not been given the words to describe how multiple yourselves are were purchased with funds provided by the Shane Akeroyd Fund for British Art in 2023.}

^{Sin Wai Kin is an artist based in London.}