For Cement Fondu’s 6th annual pairing of an esteemed international artist with a local rising star, Turner Prize nominated Sin Wai Kin is teamed with award-winning multidisciplinary artist Rainbow Chan in Retellings, a gallery exhibition and live performance, co-presented with Phoenix Central Park.

Exhibited at Cement Fondu, Retellings (Revisions) combines the two artists’ world-building practices to envelop audiences in an estranged environment that weaves together newly commissioned artwork by Chan with film works by UK-based Sin, which have previously not been seen in Australia before. 

Working across video, performance and installation, the artists create speculative narratives that blur the real and imagined and confront limiting categorisations, such as East and West; past, present and future; and gender binaries. They similarly intersect the visual arts with broader creative and embodied practices, such as pop music, club culture, opera and drag, artisanal craft and costume.

In Retellings (Revisions), new silk painting, sculpture and a short film by Chan continue her exploration of bittersweet bridal laments passed down via matrilineal storytelling through the Weitou women indigenous to Hong Kong, withwhom she has ancestral ties. While full of despair, Chan reinvests these laments with hope, celebrating them as fierce moments of public protest and affecting, metaphorical meditations on the diasporic experience of transitioning between homes.

Interwoven with Chan’s works, Sin’s video series Portraits and film work The Story Cycle foreground the cycles of listening, embodying and telling that construct our experience of human nature, featuring recurring characters that personify traditional roles in Chinese opera.

A 2022 FINALIST in the Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) and Artist of the Year in the FBI SMAC awards, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is an interdisciplinary artist of Hong Kong-Chinese descent working across music production, performance and visual arts. Her practice engages with mistranslation, diaspora and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society with a current focus on traditional bridal laments through her ancestral ties to Weitou people, the first settlers of Hong Kong.

Sin Wai Kin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022 and their performances and works have been shown in major institutions, recently including Para Site, Hong Kong, Somerset House, London, ICA, Los Angeles, Guggenheim, New York, British Museum, ICA, London, Tank Museum, Shanghai, MOCA, Toronto, Hayward Gallery, London, 58th Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Serpentine Galleries, London.