Artist Statement
Be/Longing, Suzann Victor’s latest addition to her Lens-Painting Series, continues the re-materialization of postcard and photographic ephemera of Southeast Asia from the 1950’s into complex hand-painted tableaux that are ensconced behind a screen of lenses, effectively causing the image to never being seen clearly in its entirety.
In this departure from engaging with fully visible artworks, the audience is confronted by a “lens-scape” that serves as an interface through which paintings are encountered. A contradictory medium, the lenses obscure while also bringing details into magnified focus – contingent always upon the viewer’s position and angle of observation. Sliced and spliced into kaleidoscopic fragments, the lenses cut up the pictorial narrative to produce an optical decomposition, causing order to turn into disjuncture, flatness into depth, the singular into the multiple, and the static into the kinetic.
Be/Longing is a congregation of Otherness traversing oceans of unpredictable futures, depicted by images from the histories of migration that typified much of maritime Southeast Asia of the past. Composed on the same plane and timeline despite their multiplicities of origin and difference, these figures are unified by the waters that surround them, and the boats they hope would convey them to dreamed shores.
In current times, overcrowded boats conjure the plight of displaced asylum seekers fleeing conflict, war, and strife. Be/Longing proposes a new perspective on this issue through its look back at history - that in the past, the oceans offered a dissolution of boundaries rather than separateness. As involuntary participants and witnesses, we are all entangled in a complex network of socio-historical and cultural relations that can still compel open-ended and interwoven co-existence as before.
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 foregrounds 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”.
