Artist Statement
In this optically restless work, Sun-Moon confronts the audience with a 4m diameter screen of lenses as the site through which encounters with the open landscape are to be conducted.
Behaving like an ocular environment amplifier, 600+ lenses simultaneously obscure and bring into focus details of the surroundings as a means to renew, and at times, to confound the acts of looking and beholding the familiar – contingent always upon the viewer’s position and angle of observation.
As the spectator peers through this field of “compound eyes” whose focal length dilates vision, the surrounding landscape is repeatedly magnified, fractured, inverted and displaced all at once.
Such discontinuous ways of seeing produces an optical decomposition where the landscape is kaleidoscopically cut up by as many lenses into a proliferating faceted surface – turning the singular into the multiple, see-throughness to density and the upright into the inverted – all while activating the kinetically-engaged viewer.
Fresnel lenses bear a provenance of use in Victor’s practice since 1997 for featuring human blood droplets in her 10m glass quilt “Third World Extra Virgin Dreams 1997” shown at the 6th Havana Biennale, and subsequently, in her optically psychedelic 40m lens quilt “Bloodline of Peace 2015” commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum for the 5 Stars exhibition to mark the nation’s 50th Jubilee in 2015.
In a deviation from displaying artworks in full view, Victor harnessed the lens material’s propensity for negotiating and interrogating the visual and cerebral aspects of perception by forming lenses into a screen-interface through which encounters with a range of artworks was conducted.
The painted narratives of the Lens-Comfort Woman Series (“She’s Closer Than You Think 2019” & “She’s Dearer Than You Think 2020") present painted compositions gleaned from personal photo archives of a close friend upon discovering her grandmother’s secret history as a young sexually enslaved Comfort Woman in WWII. The Lens-River Series foreground the fracturing and displacing effects of the lenses to generate spaces of pictorial privacy and ethnographic illegibility for its colonised subjects (“River of Returning Gazes 2022, Look At You Looking At Me 2022, Lookout 2022”) while the screen prints in the Lens-Print Series feature imaginary national portraits (an 8m long mural screen print “I Was Like That Myself 2015” & smaller oval iterations “Lens-Oval Series 2015”).
The lenses are deployed in outdoor site-specific projects to amplify the fecund beauty of the open landscape in a ruined castle in the Lens-Scape Series (“Rising Sun 2018”), while “eavesdropping” into the architectural dialogue between a thousand-year-old Zen temple and an outdoor lens-enclosure in “A Thousand Skies 2017,” and an indoor enclosure as a monumental looking-device in “See Like a Heretic 2018” and “Rising Moon 2019”.
