When Sydney-based Singaporean artist Suzann Victor saw veteran Australian improv trio The Necks play an open-air show just before the COVID pandemic, something clicked. ‘That year there were a lot of cicadas, and since the group doesn’t rehearse – every note is made up on the spot – they merged their music with the cicadas’ concerto,’ Victor explains. ‘As they were tailing off, the cicadas came to the fore again. It was the most profound, sublime experience of sound I’ve ever had.’

The beauty of natural phenomena, as ordered by and melded with human intention, is something Victor pursues in her own work. During a residency at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery earlier this year, she explored fractal complexities by working with transparent acrylic discs to conceptually expand the notions of conventional printmaking. She would treat one disc ‘as a printing plate’ and use it to press a clear medium onto another. This process imprinted the base disc with what she refers to as an ‘invisible image,’ which is revealed when light shines through the disc and casts the image onto walls and surrounding surfaces.

Victor has assembled these discs in interlocking, irregularly shaped, three-dimensional organic forms, reminiscent of molecular models or even the popular Brain Flakes toy. We talk as she is preparing ‘Constellations’, her upcoming exhibition at STPI, opening in January, where docents will bring these new works to life by using flashlights to illuminate side-facing discs or those hung above eye-level. ‘And in so doing,’ the artist says, they will ‘inaugurate the self-authoring phenomenology of the artwork.’ Such partly random or chaotic effects, she hopes, might ‘transport us out of the gallery and into the world of open systems that they mirror – ranging from rivers, tributaries, lightning, cirrus clouds, trees, or spider webs to the submerged worlds of mycelium structures, root systems, mangroves, and reefs to the hidden pulmonary, arterial, and neural networks in humans, animals, or other living organisms.’

Throughout her practice, Victor centers the sensory and embodiment. The optical and the ocular have special prominence, and she frequently uses lenses of different kinds in both wall works and installations. These devices often dramatize the mundane fact that the perspective from which we observe the work is significant: Victor makes us aware of our own modes of looking in ways that connect to material, political realities.

For Prismatic River (2022), from Victor’s ‘Lens Painting’ series, for instance, the artist painted a number of details borrowed from ethnographic postcards of Southeast Asia printed between the 1920s and 1960s. Separating the viewer from the diamond-shaped grid of images, however, is a casing of acrylic lenses. The painted elements can thus never really be seen as a singular whole, only in refracted, partial views. Victor intends for this viewing experience to restore dignity – and, as she puts it, ‘a degree of privacy’ – to the imagery. While the people involved in making the original photographs had no hesitation in portraying the pictured communities to be seen as exotic, Victor reshares their records in a way that works against such easy objectification.

On the other hand, for the installation Rainbow Circle (2013), conceived for the 4th Singapore Biennale and shown at the National Museum of Singapore, the artist constructed her own kind of lens: a large-scale prismatic plane with a curtain of continuously falling water droplets. Mirrors diverted sunlight from outside into the museum and through the water, allowing visitors to see, from certain angles, rainbows indoors. The work drew on Victor’s memories of growing up in Singapore – a country whose tropical climate means daily navigations are often focused on keeping out of the hot sun or torrential rains – but it also offers an echo or externalization of the mechanisms in our bodies through which we perceive light.

Although Victor left Singapore 21 years ago to further her studies in Australia and ended up making it her home, Southeast Asia remains a principal context for her practice. ‘I’m always living in a very paradoxical way,’ she says. ‘You belong, and you don’t belong. You’re an insider nowhere, and you’re an outsider everywhere. At the end of the day, identity is really about multiple states of belongings, I think.’

Victor is, perhaps unsurprisingly, drawn to Lebanese Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s concept of ‘lenticularity’. In The Diasporic Condition (2021), Hage describes the ‘entanglement of multiple realities’ experienced by diasporic people – a mode of existence in which simultaneous belongings ‘compete, intrude, and dialogue with each other’, like the two images contained in a lenticular photograph. A diasporic person may be in a local restaurant eating local food, but if they drink something that connects them to their homeland, they become situated in both realities contemporaneously, the two ‘continuously refracting each other’.

The artist also values the way that her emigration has enabled her to see her birthplace from a distance: both Singapore and Australia were established as British settler colonies within decades of one another, resulting in the marginalization of Indigenous populations. Victor has also learned from becoming part of an ethnic minority (Chinese) in her adoptive home: ‘It’s not easy, but it’s a gift,’ she says. ‘It’s given me not just an intellectual idea, but a visceral, lived experience of what it means to be in a minority position. It tells me of my involuntary complicity as part of a dominant group in other contexts.’

While Victor’s art deals at times with the specificities of location – Southeast Asian history, in Prismatic River, say – its strong phenomenological emphasis foregrounds the shared experience of what it is to have a body and to perceive the world. In this context, she refers to the German art historian and media theorist Hans Belting’s conceptualization of the body as the ‘locus of images.’ Though Belting’s theory offers a general intervention in the study of images, it has a special resonance with Victor’s work in the way it describes the viewer’s body as the medium in which an image is formed. So often returning to the importance of our physical standpoint, Victor gestures towards differences that must be acknowledged, but also, optimistically, to grounding commonalities.