ART BASEL HONG KONG 2026

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 New World Amusement Park, Golden Mile Complex, Cavenagh Bridge and Roxy Theatre in Singapore; General Post Office, Man Wah Sun Chuen, Freemasons Hall, and Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong; the Binondo Church and shanty houses in Manila, 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, City 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.’

View the work at Booth EN12, Level 3 at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. Gajah Gallery will also present a meticulously curated selection of Southeast Asia’s influential and emerging artists at Booth 1B39.