Eggplants by Suzann Victor at NGS: Instagrammable entry point to wronged artist

SINGAPORE – The eggplant, or aubergine or brinjal, has always been a fruit with many names.

But does it smell sweet? One might be forgiven for thinking so at the National Gallery Singapore, with so many visitors hovering their noses so close to its rotting flesh.

The purplish protuberances were part of a commissioned work created by Australia-based Singapore artist Suzann Victor, once sidelined but in fresh vogue in 2025.

Titled Still Life, the 200 eggplants were catnip not just for Instagram but also gallery thieves. In August, they made headlines after some were found to be missing, prompting NGS to set up signage warning visitors against touching the wall-mounted commentary on drooping, futile masculinity.

It is not the first time Victor has found herself at the centre of an art cause celebre. The work itself is an expansion on her 1992 piece, where she also stuck 100 brinjals outside Parkway Parade to get workers trudging to the office in the morning to “wake up”.

The gradual decomposition is the point, its phallic connotations pre-dating the eggplant emoji. It is also art’s way of continually challenging what it can encompass and its materiality, which – most controversially with Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana – has long pushed past conventional ideas of painting and sculpture.

But 2025 has also been an interesting banner year for Victor, who is one of Singapore’s most important performance art pioneers and co-founder of 1990s art space 5th Passage.

In the country’s art history, the soft-spoken artist has carried with her a rebellious reputation, an albatross she has found difficult to shake in the local context.

In 1993, 5th Passage co-organised an event that saw the staging of the controversial Brother Cane, where artist Josef Ng turned his back on the audience to trim his pubic hair – a protest against the entrapment exercise and caning of 12 gay men that led to an effective 10-year ban on performance art.

Victor then left to seek fresh pastures in Australia, but has seen her works gain prominence across multiple galleries during this pivotal SG60 year.

At Gajah Gallery in Tanjong Pagar Distripark and at STPI – Creative Workshop And Gallery, she was given deserved solos. The one at Gajah was especially impressive with its large-scale “kinetic lanterns”, involving thousands of circular lenses stapled together to obscure and distort an assortment of South-east Asian faces.

Then, at private show Artist’s Proof: Singapore At 60, private collector Chong Huai Seng chose her lens-work Be/Longing as its centrepiece. He described it as the final piece of the jigsaw, not only linking Singapore to South-east Asia, but also representing an undeniably important woman artist.

In the same show, Sonny Liew, author of the Eisner Award-winning The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), chose to reference Victor’s drain dance – a protest at the Singapore Art Museum in 1998 against censorship of the arts – in his toy of Singapore’s first minister for foreign affairs S. Rajaratnam.

Victor was pleased with the allusion, telling The Straits Times then: “It’s so wonderful to connect with the younger generation and see that there’s an interest in our visual history.”

Her work can be seen at the Singapore Art Museum, where a suspended metal-framed bed is draped with a quilt made of lenses dabbed with human blood, in its new show Talking Objects.

She is as well the chosen artist for the main wall at Morgan Stanley’s Marina Bay office collection.

The eggplants are mere shiny entry points to an exciting, thoughtful and much bigger oeuvre. Does this signal a broad-based desire to reintegrate the artist into Singapore’s art institutions? And could a Cultural Medallion for the wronged artist be in the offing?