Another level of abstraction is found in Sin Wai Kin’s series Portraits that renders time, the core of medium of film, motionless in a digitized suspended moment. The still life of the portraits transforms a tableaux marked by a post-cinematic break with film’s index, rendering the works closer to painting than moving images.

Through world building the artist inhabits and reenacts themselves as a part of queer code, switching between portraits by Leonardo Da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Man Ray and Caravaggio. A counterpoint to the appropriation of the Western Canon, they also employ Ming Dynasty artist Lu Zhi’s painting Dreaming of a Butterfly. The portraits double as performance art and drag that draws on Cantonese Opera, creating a third space where cultural contact becomes hybrid, where figuration is masked.