It’s been a busy time for Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist Charmaine Poh. With a observe spanning images, media and efficiency, Poh explores concepts of company, restore, and the physique. Earlier this 12 months, Poh was one of many first Singaporean artists to be proven within the sixtieth Worldwide Artwork Exhibition on the Venice Biennale 2024, one of many celebrated occasions within the worldwide artwork world. Extra just lately, Poh was introduced as Deutsche Financial institution’s “Artist of the 12 months” 2025 and can debut a brand new fee at a solo exhibition at Berlin Artwork Week in September 2025.
As we communicate, Poh tells me that she has freshly returned from a visit to Thailand—with the group behind impartial media platform Jom, of which she is the top of visible tradition and media—and is about to jet set off to Italy, the place she’ll be participating in Visio – European Programme on Artists’ Transferring Pictures.
Forward, Poh tells us extra about her beginnings as an artist, the method of creating her artwork, and the way the notion of household ties into her observe.
Are you able to inform us the way you started your creative observe?
Charmaine Poh (CP): I didn’t suppose I’d grow to be an artist. After I was learning Worldwide Relations at Tufts College, I took a category in documentary observe, which concerned documentary images, video, audio, and textual content. It was arrange by a lecturer who was a battle photographer. I shortly grew to become obsessive about it, poring over picture books day in and time out, and occupied with the nonetheless picture and its potential.
I used to be so riveted by how being a photographer can change your life: while you’re embedded in a state of affairs, you’re participating with the world round you. You’re residing in that second with different folks and that adjustments your life. This wasn’t my main, however I spent nearly all my time on this.
I began with the performing arts, and I beloved appearing as a result of it took me to a different world. You need to be totally absorbed within the character’s world and I discovered that images and appearing have that similarity.
I didn’t perceive what it meant to be an artist. I didn’t come from any background with any generational affect over the humanities, so it was actually a gradual course of.
After I graduated, I began to endure mentorship programmes and youth alternatives to discover a voice aesthetically and philosophically—all whereas discovering some jobs to make cash. It was actually about cobbling collectively completely different components of my life, and in 2015-2016, one in all my tasks Room was exhibited much more. In order that was my begin, and it took a very long time, however then all the things slowly got here collectively.
What are your favorite issues concerning the mediums of images and movie?
CP: (In comparison with images), video just isn’t a static factor you dangle on the wall. The kind of concepts you wish to execute have completely different aspects as you tie collectively audio, transferring picture, and probably efficiency. It turns into much more complicated technically. That’s what my observe got here to after working solely in images for 5 years. I began to starvation for different methods to execute my concepts, so it appeared like a pure development. Kin was my first video work.
You’re at present primarily based in Berlin pursuing your PhD in Visible and Performing Arts at Freie Universität Berlin. How has this fed into your creative observe?
CP: When it comes to grounding my ideas theoretically, the programme’s actually useful. Impartial creative work can really feel unstructured and limitless. With theoretical references and grounding, you possibly can construct a basis for the place you’re going, as a result of there’s an [artistic] canon and methodology. If you wish to break the canon, that’s nice, since you at all times have some extent of reference to return to.
A lot of your earlier works function photographing portraits of ladies—be it college ladies (Room (2016)); the ma jie (Chinese language feminine migrant staff who served as home helpers in Singaporean households from the Nineteen Thirties-Seventies); Taiwanese butch tradition (Fairly Butch (2018)); and girls within the Singaporean workforce (All in her day’s work (2017-2018)). What compelled you to sort out such a broad number of topics?
CP: I didn’t actually take into consideration them as broad; I felt like every portrait spoke to part of the human psyche. Room was about reminiscence, youth, and adolescence, whereas Fairly Butch was so much concerning the efficiency of id and coming to phrases with masculinity.
The ma jie undertaking got here by as an preliminary fee about Chinatown. Some artists and I had been requested to make a piece about Chinatown. The programme tried to attach us with completely different components of Chinatown and I heard somebody say there was a ma jie in a group centre, and I used to be like, “What is that this?”
I began to analysis and search for them, and I used to be fairly struck by their radical way of life. These ma jie stepped away from marriage and devoted their lives to arduous work, labour, and migration. [Their lives] entailed celibacy and so they underwent a ritual of honour the place they tied their hair up in a sor hei (combing up) ceremony. It’s very under-recognised, and I felt passionately about it as a result of I knew there have been only a few ma jie left. There have been only a few ma jie [when I shot the project], and even fewer now.
I discover a private connection to every undertaking. Even when it’s not the lived expertise, there’s an emotional resonance. I discover them fairly private, regardless of spanning backgrounds.
Themes of queerness, care, and belonging take centre stage in Kin, one in all your current works. Filmed in 2021, the quick movie proposes an imaginary protected house for queer life in Singapore. What drove you to discover this concept — particularly throughout the pandemic?
CP: This was one other accident. I had a buddy who had just a few commercial-grade lenses for just a few additional days and so they requested me if I needed to do one thing with them. That was the way it began. It was two weeks from the day I realized concerning the lenses to the shoot. We borrowed somebody’s home and we shot for half a day. We gathered automobiles and everybody did it without cost. Everybody was additionally itching to do one thing.
This was probably in response to the pandemic; the concept of the significance of security in shared areas and discovering belonging. A number of queer folks, in the event that they reside with their household, might not have the assist they want. So this movie was a gesture in the direction of a risk. It was a kind of situations the place I felt images wouldn’t suffice.
The idea of household performs a significant position in What’s softest on the earth rushes and runs over what’s hardest on the earth, which gives a glimpse of the struggles of queer parenthood in Singapore. What was your inspiration behind pursuing the undertaking?
CP: I had been discussing an enlargement of Kin with Adriano Pedrosa (the Curator of the sixtieth Worldwide Artwork Exhibition on the Venice Biennale 2024) and I believed one of the best method could be a component two. With queer parenthood, I believed it might be a chance to develop on the narrative of the nurturing of recent life. It felt extra cosmological, as a result of debates surrounding nature and nurture are at all times positioned upon queer folks.
I had been studying Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s rendition of the Chinese language classical textual content, Dao De Jing, and spending loads of time within the lakes round Berlin. All this subconsciously flowed into how I approached the undertaking. I didn’t wish to give attention to the queer dad and mom solely as documentary topics, however to carry out these questions on world-making, the pure world, and the way we’re all interconnected.
I already knew one of many dad and mom, so I slowly contacted the remainder from there. I had been engaged on these associated tales for just a few years, and I felt that it was vital for this subject as some folks had been slightly cautious of getting their identities identified—particularly relating to defending their kids, worrying about their kids getting bullied or folks of their office realizing.
I feel there’s nonetheless this worry as a result of [these parents] sit in a gray space, the place one in all them is legally not associated to the kid. So there are loads of query marks round family-making in Singapore, which knowledgeable this method to not present faces within the work.
What does “household” imply to you?
CP: To me, household is a communal train of generosity, solidarity, non-judgment and care. These rules have actually helped me in my life; I couldn’t have been capable of do any of this alone.
You’re additionally a member of the Asian Feminist Studio for Artwork and Analysis (AFSAR), which archives up to date feminist discourse and artist analysis. How did you become involved with that and why was this an necessary trigger so that you can be part of?
CP: I acquired concerned with that by becoming a member of AFSAR’s examine group for the e-book Artwork and Cosmotechnics by Hong Kong thinker Yuk Hui. AFSAR is an element collective, half community, and half platform that has these examine teams primarily based on principle and creative observe. From there, it opened loads of concepts of how we view the world.
There’s additionally one other examine group known as Asia as Precept, which is about disentangling earlier notions of what Asia is, in addition to what feminism and queerness are. It goes into these non-Western notions of those necessary questions.
To spherical out the interview, how would you describe your observe in three phrases?
CP: Buoyant, tenacious, and emotive.
This text was first seen on Grazia Singapore.
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