Initially trained as a painter at the Lasalle College of the Arts (1988–1990) whilst a housewife, Suzann Victor’s practice has since expanded to include sculptural installation and performance. Moving to Sydney, Australia, in 1996, she enrolled at the University of Western Sydney, where she completed her BA, MA and eventually, in 2008, her doctorate in visual art.

With a bodily and emotive approach to abstract painting in the early phase of her practice, S. Victor easily found formal affinities in her transition towards installation and performance. As early as 1989 in a group exhibition entitled Break, S. Victor and her fellow Singapore artists sought to break with painterly conventions by suspending them in mid-air and arranging them into a central cube, having them change their positions daily. In 1991 she co-founded 5^th Passage, Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored non-profit independent and interdisciplinary art space. Situated at Parkway Parade shopping centre in the eastern suburbs of Singapore, it had the aim of helping fledgling artists and bringing art closer to the people by demystifying it. Here she created Still Life (1992), an overtly feminist commentary on the patriarchy which featured walls festooned with phallus-like aubergines, which were left to putrefy over time, changing its visage from aggression to sad comedy.

It was at 5^th Passage’s second venue, at Pacific Plaza, that S. Victor created her most iconic installations. Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1994) presented a row of light bulbs strung up through baby bouncer mechanisms, constantly striking individual panes of mirrors and thus sounding the act of female auto-eroticism and sexual fantasy in tandem with the societal and mental pressures associated with female reproduction. His Mother is a Theatre (1994) invokes the body’s presence through its absence. A 10-metre sheet of black velvet is stretched across the room, each end sewn into a dress, with hollowed out loaves of bread lit by bulbs within them. Woks attached to a mechanical baby bouncer clang, while circles of hair on the floor spell out words like ‘clitoris’, ‘orgasm’, ‘milk’ and ‘castration’. In Still Waters (1998), S. Victor performed a piece of institutional critique at the Singapore Art Museum by filling its second-floor perimeter drain canals with above ankle-height water, then moving her body through these claustrophobic ‘in-between spaces’, which were created by erecting glass panels in the colonial-era building.

Since 2015, S. Victor has worked with novel ways of printing transparent acrylic discs, playing with the experiential poetry of transient light and shadow in physical space and bringing awareness to bodily encounters and sensorial discoveries.

S. Victor has exhibited internationally at the 2nd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane (1996), the 6th Havana Biennale (1997) and was the first female artist to represent the country at the first Singapore Pavilion for Venice Biennale (2001). She was also included in the 6th Gwangju Biennale (2006), the exhibition Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM), Karlsruhe (2007) and at the 2013 Singapore Biennale, where she created Rainbow Circle, an optical-meteorological installation that replicated the evanescent appearance of rainbows in a museum’s rotunda atrium, deepening her investigations into reflected and refracted light whilst drawing attention to environmental issues.