Charmaine Poh: Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take

Water is omnipresent in Poh’s work. It represents life, fluidity, a soft but persistent energy. Her video installation The Moon is Wet (2025) tells the story of the “majie”—migrant, unmarried domestic workers who have worked as cooks and nannies in Singapore since the 1930s. They formed their own communities of alternative kinships. Singapore’s economic rise is as closely linked to its waterfront location as it is to the migration of laborers. Poh gives voice to their forgotten stories and marginalized lives in her three-channel video installation. She interweaves the monologues of a fictional majie and a present-day domestic worker with the myth of the sea goddess Mazu, a protective deity for the Hokkien-speaking population of Southeast Asia, creating a discourse on solidarity and collective action.

For Poh, care also means caring for the planet. Her film What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2024, is dedicated to tender, vulnerable moments. Voices, sounds, and images blend together: stories from queer couples about their feelings during childbirth, the first moments in the delivery room, breastfeeding. These intimate glimpses into non-heteronormative families in Singapore are intercut with images of trees, forest floors, and skies—nature scenes and microscopic worlds inhabited by insects and tiny organisms. The film explores love, the fears of LGBTQ+ parents, egg freezing, artificial insemination, and the decision to start a family in Singapore despite legal obstacles and social rejection—an act of resistance. Poh advocates for the protection of endangered ecosystems, animals, and plants, as well as for the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Her work also addresses the blurred boundaries between the “natural” and the “artificial.” Much like ecology itself, Poh calls for empathy in the use of new technologies and in the digital realm.

In films such as public solitude (2022) and GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2021-2023), she processes her traumatic experiences as a child television star in Singapore in the 1990s. Using AI and archival footage, she creates a deepfake avatar of her younger self—a response to the sexualization of her child’s body and the media attention it received. This avatar becomes a medium for media critique and cyberfeminist activism. As in all her work, Poh’s focus is on selfempowerment in a world where the lines between reality and virtuality are increasingly dissolving.

Curator: Britta Färber, Global Head of Art & Culture, Deutsche Bank