The Time of Our Lives is a two-channel video installation by Sin Wai Kin that blends science fiction, sitcom tropes, and speculative theory to challenge fixed notions of time, truth, and self. Set within the familiar format of a daytime TV show and punctuated by the laughter of a 'live' studio audience, the work follows the looping, non-linear lives of a couple—V Sin and Wai King—as they navigate a reality unmoored from chronological order.

Reference to apocalypse, either as imminent or approaching dissolves any clear cause-and-effect relationship of time. Their domestic world – a living room, isolated and floating in the vastness of an alien universe outside, unfolds in fractured temporalities and ambiguous readings of chronology and duration. This is exacerbated by a flickering television in their room. On the screen, The Storyteller, an ambiguous narrator, emerges periodically to disrupt the sitcom narrative with philosophical asides, that pointedly ground the work within its themes. In one such moment they proclaim, ‘The ways in which we are conditioned to experience time are reflected in the ways that we think, talk about, and conceptualise our relationships with others, the world and the universe!’

Drawing on theories from quantum mechanics and general relativity, Sin Wai Kin unravels time not only as a structure but as a social and emotional condition. The viewer is positioned in a state of oscillation—between two screens, between character and audience, between sincerity and performance. It is not only the central protagonists that blur the boundary between fiction and presence but also the audience. Mostly, we confront their blank, confused, ambivalent or bored faces, until prompts incite their response on demand, laughter, arousal, sympathy, applause. The emotional authenticity usually provided by an audience’s response is also plainly constructed here: We are left wondering if V Sin and Wai King are performing for their audience, for us, or if they are simply living through a dream. Through recursive dialogues and ruptured timelines, The Time of Our Lives becomes a space of temporal disobedience—one that reflects the instability of identity, memory, and meaning in contemporary life.