Gajah Gallery is set to present the Singaporean artist’s luminous installation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026
Singapore Art Week may have come and gone, but those still eager to get their art fix still have Art Basel Hong Kong to look forward to. It is good news, then, that Singaporean patrons heading to the fair, taking place from 27 to 29 March, will find a measure of home-grown presence alongside the wider slate of Asia-Pacific exhibitions and installations.
Presented by Gajah Gallery—the 30-year-old gallery known for its commitment to Southeast Asian contemporary art—Singaporean and Sydney-based artist Suzann Victor will present City Lantern (2025) in Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong’s sector dedicated to large-scale installations.
The kinetic work measures 3.6m in diameter and comprises a slowly rotating photographic panorama positioned behind a ring of Fresnel lenses, producing a shifting field of refracted images that changes according to the viewer’s movement around the work.
The imagery that makes up City Lantern draws from a combination of colonial-era photographs and contemporary images from across Southeast and East Asia. Studio portraits, postcards, and architectural views—many dating to the early twentieth century—are interwoven with more recent photographs of urban sites in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Manila.
Appearing as part of a continuous panoramic field, these images bend, enlarge, and slip in and out of view as a 10m mural rotates behind the lenses. The result is a hypnotic and shifting composition that traces a visual story of geography, migration, modernity, and the legacies of war.
This, of course, is a familiar thread through Suzann Victor’s works. Working across performance, installation, and lens-based forms, the artist—who became the first woman to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001—has often examined how perception is shaped by optics, bodies in space, and historical frameworks.
First presented in Victor’s 2025 solo exhibition A Thousand Histories at Gajah Gallery Singapore, City Lantern will be shown at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 at Booth EN12, Level 3, within Encounters. Gajah Gallery will also present a selection of Southeast Asian artists at its main fair booth, 1B39.
