Victoria Sin: 'A lot of drag is misogynistic but for me gender is the butt of the joke, not women'

In the Park Nights series the Serpentine cuts loose, inviting experimental artists to make new work to perform amid its annual pavilion commission. It also provides a moment where the Serpentine can introduce emerging artists, and on Friday, Victoria Sin, among the most exciting young artists working in London, will create something spectacular.

The sky as an image, an image as a net, is “a fragmented narrative”, Sin tells me when we meet in the Serpentine’s Chucs restaurant. The work is typical of Park Nights’ celebration of multi-disciplinary work. “There are about 16 different works in this performance. Five-minute poems, sketches, songs, and they’re all written from different experiences.”

At the heart of the piece is Sin’s performance in drag, which they explore in connection with speculative fiction (Sin identifies as non-binary and so uses “they” as a pronoun). “I describe it as a story of a character’s journey through different locations, of coming to an identity, being shaped by all these different experiences,” they say. “It’s a story of transformation through looking at images, through language, through sexual experience, and how all of these things come together, not in any concrete way, but they shape who you are. They shaped my drag character and also myself.”

Now 27, Sin was born in Toronto and has lived in London since 2009. They first became interested in drag aged 17, but it was after their move to London that they became a performer. In Toronto, they explain, “there were no people who were assigned female at birth among the people who did drag”.

But London was different. “In London’s drag scene there are fewer drag queens who are trying to pass as women or trying to look real, trying to look seamless,” they explain. “It was a lot about this idea of genderf**k drag: it’s not about looking like a man or a woman, you can be in drag as a binbag or as a monster. And because of that, because it was so much less about drag that was trying to imitate perfect gender constructs, people from all different gender backgrounds were coming in and just doing whatever.”

Sin had initially gained a reputation on the club scene as an illustrator, and the glitter penises they did for the toilets of a favourite club haunt, Vogue Fabrics in Dalston, are a legacy of those early artistic endeavours. But at the club they had met figures such as Holestar, a female drag queen, so while it was still “really daunting”, Sin says, “I felt comfortable enough to admit to myself that I had always wanted to do this thing, and that I could just do it.”

Sin’s drag character draws visual inspiration from certain “icons of femininity”, including Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and Jessica Rabbit, the animated character in Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. “For me it’s about looking at the genealogy of images of femininity, so one will come from the other,” Sin says. “And through the continued performance or representation of these images of femininity, that specific kind of femininity is naturalised, and then the next person who takes it up has to do it even more for it to be spectacular. This is how images of femininity become so outrageous and why it’s normal for celebrities such as Kim Kardashian to have a body that is so sculpted.”

Like other non-male drag queens, Sin has encountered hostility to their drag character and work. “I started getting comments from people, mostly online, who really took offence, I mean really hated me. And even now, sometimes on my Instagram pictures, I have people being like, ‘You’re an idiot, drag is for men, stop doing what you’re doing.’” How does Sin explain this reaction? “On the first level, I’m somebody who is read as a woman who is unapologetically taking up space in a space that has a subtle but very present misogynist undertone and attitude,” they say.

Sin notes that sometimes on RuPaul’s TV series Drag Race and elsewhere, “the drag that people do is very misogynist… often the butt of the joke is women. But, for me, the butt of the joke is gender.” Amid this context, Sin is clearly pleased to be included in the Hayward Gallery’s show DRAG, opening in August, which, they say, is “about expanding representations of who’s doing drag and why they’re doing it and what that looks like”.

Inevitably, given Sin’s subject matter, much of their work is deeply personal, and elements of autobiography punctuate their Park Nights performance. “There are some incredibly personal moments in there,” they say, while adding the words of the psychologist Carl Rogers: “What is most personal is most universal.” These autobiographical elements might relate to sexuality and gender but they also touch on family, and the “dynamics of being a mixed- race person and having a Chinese dad and a white mum,” Sin says. Victoria Sin is their real name, despite the fact that, because it’s such an apt name for a drag artist, “everyone thinks it’s fake”.

One way that Sin’s Asian background is alluded to is through excerpts from the African-American writer Samuel R Delany’s sci-fi classic Babel-17, which was, Sin says, “the first book that I ever read that had an Asian female protagonist”, Rydra Wong. Delany’s work is part of the “social science fiction” sub-genre, more anthropological than technological. Sin admits to having been “a science fiction nerd” from childhood, and now links the works of Delany, and other key sci-fi writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, to the experience of drag.

“These movements that were attached to activism like Afro-futurism and cyber-feminism, are ways of using speculative fiction to imagine what a better world looks like, and how it functions,” Sin says. Through reading them, Sin argues, “you can even have an idea of what it would feel like to live there. So in this way it functions like drag, in that it’s a way of taking yourself out — for science fiction out of your environmental, social context, and for drag, out of your bodily context.”

Sin hopes their work functions like “good science fiction”, so that you come away from “a particularly immersive story with some different perspectives to take away with you and think about while you’re moving through the real world”. Babel-17 means so much to Sin because not only is Wong Asian but, they explain, she’s “a genius: somebody who was a writer, a poet, known across galaxies for her work”.

Sin may not yet be able to reach other galaxies, but they’re on the brink of becoming a big star in this one.

Park Nights: Victoria Sin, Friday, Serpentine Galleries, W2; DRAG: Self-Portraits and Body Politics, Hayward Gallery, SE1, Aug 22–Oct 14