Sin Wai Kin’s Painterly Prints

Innovated by Edgar Degas and William Blake in the 19th century, a monotype is a unique impression created by pressing a painted surface onto another, like paper. The result is irreproducible, since any subsequent impression depends on the pigment remaining on the plate. That singularity distinguishes monotypes from other print forms and accounts for their nickname: the painterly print.

Unrestrained by reproducibility, a monotype is the mark of a freehand. It functions much like a painting or drawing, as demonstrated by artist Sin Wai Kin’s expansive series of faceprints, created when Sin presses a face-wipe to their painted face. Known as ‘Impressions’, they are central to Sin’s practice, because they capture the art of transformation that Sin embodies by acting out fictional roles in multimedia installations that manifest worlds structured not by lives so much as stories and dreams.

Characters with face paint inspired by feminine Dan and masculine Jing characters in Cantonese and Peking Opera feature in films like A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021), which navigates a blur of reveries and realities, and It’s Always You (2021), where Sin plays each archetype in a heart-throbbing boyband. Symbols and colours on faces function as codes. For the two-bodied The Construct, for instance, one is shaded and pink for bravery and loyalty, and the other green and yellow for irritability and cruelty.

Forming the backbone of Sin’s cinematic multiverse are figures like the blue-faced Change, marked by a butterfly’s red wings with brown-eye markings, and the flame-haired intergalactic newscaster, The Storyteller, with an imploding red star for a visage. They exist in a landscape of Sin’s own making, best described as an ever-unfolding world of worlds, designed to unsettle the binaries structuring daily life; whether man or woman, victim and villain, individual and context. The Universe, styled after the heroic masculine faamin or flower face, features a landscape for a face, with a red lotus flower blooming at his third eye.

“The individual could be the flower sitting in the landscape, or the whole planet set against the stars across the forehead – it becomes a matter of perception which detail is seen to reflect their essence,” Sin explains. “The same goes for The Construct. Whichever face is deemed the character’s real one depends on the circumstances and from which perspective and narrative you encounter them.”

The evolution of each figure across Sin’s films is extended through the archiving of the faceprints that record the residues of their living compositions – testaments to an ongoing labour of transformation. “I am renegotiating what it means to bring an image to the surface, perform it purposefully, and then wipe it away,” Sin explains. “I see my use of makeup and costume as an embodied form of speculative fiction, which brings to life and informs the storytelling in my practice, where the retelling of the binary of fantasy and reality asks: How could things be different?”

Like Sin’s films, each faceprint taps into worlds that are never still: a quality rendered somewhat epic in the two-channel video installation The Time of Our Lives (2024), a cosmic sitcom where Wai King, a classic male hunk, and V Sin, an early drag persona modelled after a mid-century Hollywood bombshell, hurtle through quantum space-time. The instability that Sin conjures through the collapse of linearity in a work like this is paradoxically replicated through the existence of the artist’s faceprint archive. Because even when the same face is pressed, each impression emerges as a fresh iteration shaped by the contingency of a performance in time, creating something of a ripple effect – of faceprints all the way down.

This is why Sin’s faceprints occupy an intriguing technical space. While fundamentally monotypes, these are effectively monoprints: unique impressions within a series, each retaining a core element thanks to the plate’s matrix, which in this case is Sin’s own face. To call them monoprints, then, fits, since every role Sin composes boils down to one: the artist. “Humans experience everything through the senses – that is, through the physical within the social body – and our unique perspectives inform our experiences of the world and idea of reality,” Sin explains. “Each character is another window that questions what I believe as a result of my relationship to the environment that has shaped me.”

The British Museum, which holds one of Sin’s earliest faceprints, something more violent than recognition (2017), describes Sin’s use of the body to create a direct impression as ‘a witty example of the contested boundary between printmaking and drawing’, in its curatorial note, citing historical precedents like Yves Klein’s Anthropometry series (1960) and Anthony Gormley’s Body and Soul (1990, 2004).¹ (Both involved pressing body parts onto canvas or paper – models in the former, the artist’s genitals in the latter.)

Sin offers a queer perspective on this tradition, harnessing their body’s sloughings as a means of recording its form,’ the text continues, recalling compositions made from bodily residue like Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers (1991–1992), and holy relics like the Turin Shroud, with its alleged print of Christ’s face.²

Sin describes their faceprints in similar terms, as a death mask that holds their sweat, skin cells and sometimes tears. This makes sense, given the body’s centrality in Sin’s work, in which the artist transforms into a compass that charts pathways through and beyond arbitrary containments and codifications.

“With each mask I remove, I come closer to an embodied realisation of impermanence,” Sin explains. “There’s nothing intrinsic at the bottom of identity, no truth to be uncovered; just a subjective experience defined by our relationality.”

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One Work zooms in on a single work or series by an artist to contextualise historical pieces from contemporary perspective, or to illuminate how artists today are redefining printing and paper-based practices.