HONG KONG.- Gajah Gallery will present Suzann Victor’s monumental kinetic installation City Lantern at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. The work will be shown at Booth EN12, Level 3 as part of Encounters, the sector dedicated to large-scale installations, sculptures, and performances. City Lantern is a reflection on Asia’s evolving urban landscapes, pairing colonial-era photographs with contemporary images into a panoramic, rotating cityscape. Through its field of Fresnel lenses, the region’s histories fracture and recombine — buildings, bodies, and landscapes surfacing and dissolving in shifting constellations.
At once luminous and disorienting, City Lantern is a 3.6-metre-wide kinetic installation in which a ten-meter photographic mural rotates slowly behind a ring of Fresnel lenses. The composition weaves together approximately sixty architectural sites from across the region, such as the General Post Office, Man Wah Sun Chuen, Freemasons Hall, and Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong; the Binondo Church and shanty houses in Manila; Tiger Pagoda in Taiwan; the Temple of Heaven in Beijing and a comfort women station in Singapore, among others. This pictorial narrative maps a visual geography shaped by empire, migration, and aspirations to modernity, where buildings act as palimpsests, bearing the legacies of war, conflict, and the often invisible histories of women.
First presented in her 2025 solo show A Thousand Histories at Gajah Gallery Singapore, City Lantern expands upon Victor’s Lens-paintings and Lens-Sculptures body of works, confronting colonial-era photographic and post-card imagery to reclaim space for obscured histories of women and migration. Most of the images refracted through the lenses are drawn from colonial-era photographic records of Southeast Asia, dating to the turn of the 20th century. Comprising studio portraits and postcards—popular forms of visual culture at the time—these photographs reflect racial and social hierarchies that shaped perceptions of the region through a colonial lens.
By bringing City Lantern into the global stage of Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong, Victor expands the work’s frame of reference. In this context, the lantern becomes more than an optical device: it is a space of encounter where audiences navigate histories of visibility and invisibility, of colonial image-making and its undoing. The very act of seeing is unsettled, made contingent on the viewer’s movement. From one perspective, the panorama might read as a continuous cinematic scroll; from another, it might fracture into a surface of unstable, shifting images. Larger lenses trace the panorama’s clockwise rotation while smaller ones generate counter-rotations, conjuring the uncanny sensation of two directions at once.
Victor has long defied disciplinary boundaries. From her historic participation at the 6th Havana Biennale — the first time the biennale included an Asian section—to being the first woman artist to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001, she has consistently probed the poetics and politics of visibility. Through collaborations with Yogya Art Lab (YAL), Gajah Gallery’s production arm in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, she has expanded her lens sculptures to an architectural scale. Her lens-based explorations also include Sea Lantern II (2025), a commissioned work currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia, and Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997), first shown at the 1997 Havana Biennale and now in the collection of the Singapore Art Museum.
On the stage of Encounters, Sea Lantern is presented as a luminous, disorienting archive that transforms colonial images into a kinetic ocean of vision. It asks us to reconsider what it means to look, to remember, and to orient ourselves amidst fractured yet interwoven worlds. In the words of writer Anca Rujoiu, “As in Victor’s other kinetic sculptures, the unmooring perception stems not from engineering complexity but from the quiet force of fundamental optical physics. No single image can be fully seen, consumed, or possessed. There is no fixed vantage point. There is no totalising gaze. The image remains in perpetual motion; it refuses to yield clarity or closure.”
Suzann Victor is a Singapore-born, Sydney-based contemporary artist known for prospecting the contours of human sensorial experience, perception and phenomena. Her works activate materials derived from the body, the physics of light, water, sound and lenses, in conjunction with engineered components and the readymade. Through intimate performances, large-scale installations, public artworks and collective labour, Victor creates immersive environments that draw awareness to the viewer’s own body as an investigative tool for apprehending the world at large.
The first female artist to represent Singapore at its inaugural showing in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), she is the concept-developer of 5th Passage, Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored female-artist-run space that set the precedent of reaching out to the public long before “outreach” became a mainstay of local art institutions to come. A leading figure in Singapore’s contemporary art ecology, Victor’s socio-political works are recognised for their critical engagement with the colonial aftermath in Southeast Asia, the politics of female disembodiment and the inversion of the abject.
On environmental concerns, her meteorological installation at the 4th Singapore Biennale employed green technology to produce objectless art - optically conjured with the eye - by inducing natural rainbow arcs to appear within the museum’s rotunda. Its methodological precursor, the Rich Manoeuvre iterations, presented a mid-air calligraphy of twelve live ephemeral drawings rendered by moving lights from swaying chandelier-pendulums – a signature kinetic series whose ocular nature captivated audiences physiologically and psychologically at multiple international venues. This conflation of dynamic image, sumptuous materiality, movement, and multi-tiered concepts epitomises Victor’s oeuvre.
Victor’s works have been commissioned for presentation beyond Venice in notable exhibitions including the 6th Havana Biennale, 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the 6th Gwangju Biennale, and the 4th Singapore Biennale. As part of the Sunshower Exhibition (Tokyo, 2017), she was invited by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum for a special artist residency to create a cultural response to the city. Her iconic performance, Still Waters 1998, was honoured 21 years later as the theme of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in 2019.
She received her MA and BA (First Class Honours) and completed her doctorate in 2009 at the University of Western Sydney, supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award and the UWS Top Up Award. Victor’s works reside in public and private collections worldwide.
