It’s been a busy time for Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist Charmaine Poh. With a practice spanning photography, media and performance, Poh explores ideas of agency, repair, and the body. Earlier this year, Poh was one of the first Singaporean artists to be shown in the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2024, one of the celebrated events in the international art world. More recently, Poh was announced as Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2025 and will debut a new commission at a solo exhibition at Berlin Art Week in September 2025.

As we speak, Poh tells me that she has freshly returned from a trip to Thailand—with the team behind independent media platform Jom, of which she is the head of visual culture and media—and is about to jet set off to Italy, where she’ll be taking part in Visio – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images.

Ahead, Poh tells us more about her beginnings as an artist, the process of making her art, and how the notion of family ties into her practice. 

Can you tell us how you began your artistic practice?

Charmaine Poh (CP): I didn’t think I’d become an artist. When I was studying International Relations at Tufts University, I took a class in documentary practice, which involved documentary photography, video, audio, and text. It was set up by a lecturer who was a war photographer. I quickly became obsessed with it, poring over photo books day in and day out, and thinking about the still image and its potential. 

I was so riveted by how being a photographer can change your life: when you’re embedded in a situation, you’re engaging with the world around you. You’re living in that moment with other people and that changes your life. This wasn’t my major, but I spent virtually all my time on this.

I started with the performing arts, and I loved acting because it took me to another world. You have to be fully absorbed in the character’s world and I found that photography and acting have that similarity. 

I didn’t understand what it meant to be an artist. I didn’t come from any background with any generational influence over the arts, so it was certainly a gradual process.

When I graduated, I started to undergo mentorship programmes and youth opportunities to find a voice aesthetically and philosophically—all while finding some jobs to make money. It was really about cobbling together different parts of my life, and in 2015-2016, one of my projects Room was exhibited a lot more. So that was my start, and it took a long time, but then everything slowly came together. 

What are your favourite things about the mediums of photography and film?

CP: (Compared to photography), video is not a static thing you hang on the wall. The type of ideas you want to execute have different facets as you tie together audio, moving image, and possibly performance. It becomes a lot more complex technically. That’s what my practice came to after working solely in photography for five years. I started to hunger for other ways to execute my ideas, so it seemed like a natural progression. Kin was my first video work. 

You’re currently based in Berlin pursuing your PhD in Visual and Performing Arts at Freie Universität Berlin. How has this fed into your artistic practice?

CP: In terms of grounding my thoughts theoretically, the programme’s really helpful. Independent artistic work can feel unstructured and endless. With theoretical references and grounding, you can build a foundation for where you’re going, because there’s an [artistic] canon and methodology. If you want to break the canon, that’s fine, because you always have a point of reference to return to.

Much of your earlier works feature photographing portraits of women—be it school girls (Room (2016)); the ma jie (Chinese female migrant workers who served as domestic helpers in Singaporean households from the 1930s-1970s); Taiwanese butch culture (Pretty Butch (2018)); and women in the Singaporean workforce (All in her day’s work (2017-2018)). What compelled you to tackle such a broad variety of subjects? 

CP: I didn’t really think about them as broad; I felt like each portrait spoke to a part of the human psyche. Room was about memory, youth, and adolescence, while Pretty Butch was a lot about the performance of identity and coming to terms with masculinity. 

The ma jie project came through as an initial commission about Chinatown. Some artists and I were asked to make a work about Chinatown. The programme tried to connect us with different parts of Chinatown and I heard someone say there was a ma jie in a community centre, and I was like, “What is this?”

I started to research and look for them, and I was quite struck by their radical way of living. These ma jie stepped away from marriage and dedicated their lives to hard work, labour, and migration. [Their lives] entailed celibacy and they underwent a ritual of honour where they tied their hair up in a sor hei (combing up) ceremony. It’s very under-recognised, and I felt passionately about it because I knew there were very few ma jie left. There were very few ma jie [when I shot the project], and even fewer now.

I find a personal connection to each project. Even if it’s not the lived experience, there’s an emotional resonance. I find them quite personal, despite spanning backgrounds.

Themes of queerness, care, and belonging take centre stage in Kin, one of your recent works. Filmed in 2021, the short film proposes an imaginary safe space for queer life in Singapore. What drove you to explore this idea — especially during the pandemic?

CP: This was another accident. I had a friend who had a few commercial-grade lenses for a few extra days and they asked me if I wanted to do something with them. That was how it started. It was two weeks from the day I learned about the lenses to the shoot. We borrowed someone’s house and we shot for half a day. We gathered cars and everyone did it for free. Everyone was also itching to do something.

This was potentially in response to the pandemic; the idea of the importance of safety in shared spaces and finding belonging. A lot of queer people, if they live with their family, may not have the support they need. So this film was a gesture towards a possibility. It was one of those instances where I felt photography wouldn’t suffice.

The concept of family plays a major role in What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, which offers a glimpse of the struggles of queer parenthood in Singapore. What was your inspiration behind pursuing the project?

CP: I had been discussing an expansion of Kin with Adriano Pedrosa (the Curator of the 60th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2024) and I thought the best approach would be a part two. With queer parenthood, I thought it would be an opportunity to expand on the narrative of the nurturing of new life. It felt more cosmological, because debates surrounding nature and nurture are always placed upon queer people.

I had been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of the Chinese classical text, Dao De Jing, and spending a lot of time in the lakes around Berlin. All this subconsciously flowed into how I approached the project. I didn’t want to focus on the queer parents solely as documentary subjects, but to bring out these questions about world-making, the natural world, and how we’re all interconnected. 

I already knew one of the parents, so I slowly contacted the rest from there. I had been working on these related stories for a few years, and I felt that it was necessary for this topic as some people were a little wary of having their identities known—especially when it comes to protecting their children, worrying about their children getting bullied or people in their workplace knowing. 

I think there’s still this fear because [these parents] sit in a grey area, where one of them is legally not related to the child. So there are a lot of question marks around family-making in Singapore, which informed this approach not to show faces in the work. 

What does “family” mean to you?

CP: To me, family is a communal exercise of generosity, solidarity, non-judgment and care. These principles have really helped me in my life; I couldn’t have been able to do any of this alone. 

You’re also a member of the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR), which archives contemporary feminist discourse and artist research. How did you get involved with that and why was this an important cause for you to be a part of?

CP: I got involved with that by joining AFSAR’s study group for the book Art and Cosmotechnics by Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui. AFSAR is part collective, part network, and part platform that has these study groups based on theory and artistic practice. From there, it opened a lot of ideas of how we view the world. 

There’s also another study group called Asia as Principle, which is about disentangling previous notions of what Asia is, as well as what feminism and queerness are. It goes into these non-Western notions of these important questions. 

To round out the interview, how would you describe your practice in three words?

CP: Buoyant, tenacious, and emotive.

This article was first seen on Grazia Singapore.

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