Turner Prize Nominates First Nonbinary Artist Whose Film Explores “Masculinity And Femininity”

Sin Wai Kin is the first nonbinary artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize, and the jury especially loved their film A Dream of Wholeness in Parts.

For the first time in the 37-year history of the Turner Prize, a nonbinary artist has been shortlisted for the lucrative prize.

Canadian artist Sin Wai Kin, a drag artist, was named in the preselection of four strong for the art award.

The London-based artist was nominated for their participation in the British Art Show 9 and his solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery, Frieze London.

Their work focuses on telling stories through acting, moving images, writing, and print. Much of their art is based on her “existing experience between binary categories” and “performs fictional narratives to describe lived realities of desire, identification, and awareness.”

The Turner Prize jury especially loved the Sin Dream of Totality in Parts (2021) which combines traditional Chinese drama and philosophy with modern drag, music, and poetry. In the film, different characters wake up from consecutive dreams as they travel through a beautiful dreamscape.

As Olxpraca writes, the Turner Prize judges said they were “impressed by the transgressive nature of Sin’s work” and how they “deftly translated the visceral quality of [their] live performances into film.”

In a post on Instagram, Sin Wai Kin shared that they are “honored” to be nominated for Britain’s top art award alongside “artists I admire so much.”

Sin said the white review last year said that “storytelling is central” to their work, and that science fiction has been an influence on their thinking.

They explained that the narrative of A dream of whole in parts it is “influenced by the Taoist allegory of Chuang Tzu’s Dream of the Butterfly."

“In the allegory, a philosopher wakes up from a vivid dream, in which he has been a butterfly, only to discover that he is no longer sure which state of consciousness is the true one,” Sin said.

“My film contains seven dreams that I wanted to work in the same way as Tzu’s allegory.”

They continued: “The characters move through a dreamscape, waking up from each consecutive dream, feeling unsure about where reality lies.”

The main characters in the film are "The Universe and The Construct,” Sin explained, whom they used to “expand the binaries of gender and race that I’ve been deconstructing in recent years.”

The Turner Prize was established in 1984 and is an annual award presented to a visual artist working in Great Britain or a British artist working globally. The main prize is £25,000 and an additional £10,000 for each of the other shortlisted artists.

The work of the 2022 nominees will be exhibited at the Tate Liverpool from October 20 to March 19, 2023. Others nominees they include Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, and Veronica Ryan.

Phillipson was nominated for her fourth Trafalgar Square pedestal commission, “The End,” which looks like a scoop of ice cream topped with a cherry, a fly, and a drone, as well as her solo exhibition “Rupture No 1: blowburning the bitten peach” at the Tate Great Britain.

Pollard works primarily in photography, but has also expanded into sculpture, film, and sound. The jury loved her solo show “Carbon Slowly Turning” at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and said her work has “uncovered stories and histories hidden in plain sight”.

The Turner Prize jury praised Ryan’s “highly accomplished new body of work” created during a residency on Spike Island, which “explores ecology, history, dislocation [and the] psychological impact of the pandemic.” The judges also praised the “exquisite sensuality and tact of his sculptures” for her Hackney Windrush Art Commission in London.

The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced in December at a ceremony in Liverpool.

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