What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, 2024
305
Audio Text
Charmaine Poh’s film "What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world" (2024), is a tender, intimate portrayal of queer family life in Singapore. Gentle images, voices, and sounds interweave: a baby’s foot is caressed; underwater echoes blend with the soft tumbling of pebbles. Women and non-binary people speak about giving birth and breastfeeding for the first time. Poh grants us insights into deeply personal moments. These intimate scenes are interwoven with images of nature, biotopes, and microcosms.
At the heart of the film is the love shared by queer couples and their children. It tells of artificial insemination, egg freezing, and the choice to become a parent as a queer person in Singapore, despite social stigma and, often, rejection from one’s own family. In this context, parenthood becomes an act of resistance, especially against the backdrop of local legislation: while Section 377A, a colonial-era law criminalizing sex between men, was repealed in 2022, the Singaporean parliament simultaneously reaffirmed a heteronormative definition of marriage, making the recognition of same-sex unions a distant prospect.
The film’s title references a passage from the Daodejing, the foundational text of Daoism, presumably written by the Chinese philosopher Laozi in the 4th century BCE, "The softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest. The insubstantial penetrates where there is no space. This shows the value of non-action." While Dao is often translated as the way, its meaning is ultimately untranslatable. In the Daodejing, water is described as embodying the qualities of the Dao: there is nothing softer or more yielding, yet nothing better at overcoming what is hard and unyielding. A newborn creature is soft and weak; in death, it is hard and rigid. Like water carving through stone, the soft and vulnerable in Poh’s film come to represent quiet strength and resilience. Water is a recurring symbol in Poh’s work and here represents activism. The people in the film speak of their fears, of dying without legal recognition as partners or parents, but also of their hopes for the futures of their children.
"What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world" is both a plea for the protection of LGBTQ+ families and a meditation on resilience and vulnerability.
Home
Audio Text
Charmaine Poh’s film "What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world" (2024), is a tender, intimate portrayal of queer family life in Singapore. Gentle images, voices, and sounds interweave: a baby’s foot is caressed; underwater echoes blend with the soft tumbling of pebbles. Women and non-binary people speak about giving birth and breastfeeding for the first time. Poh grants us insights into deeply personal moments. These intimate scenes are interwoven with images of nature, biotopes, and microcosms.
At the heart of the film is the love shared by queer couples and their children. It tells of artificial insemination, egg freezing, and the choice to become a parent as a queer person in Singapore, despite social stigma and, often, rejection from one’s own family. In this context, parenthood becomes an act of resistance, especially against the backdrop of local legislation: while Section 377A, a colonial-era law criminalizing sex between men, was repealed in 2022, the Singaporean parliament simultaneously reaffirmed a heteronormative definition of marriage, making the recognition of same-sex unions a distant prospect.
The film’s title references a passage from the Daodejing, the foundational text of Daoism, presumably written by the Chinese philosopher Laozi in the 4th century BCE, "The softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest. The insubstantial penetrates where there is no space. This shows the value of non-action." While Dao is often translated as the way, its meaning is ultimately untranslatable. In the Daodejing, water is described as embodying the qualities of the Dao: there is nothing softer or more yielding, yet nothing better at overcoming what is hard and unyielding. A newborn creature is soft and weak; in death, it is hard and rigid. Like water carving through stone, the soft and vulnerable in Poh’s film come to represent quiet strength and resilience. Water is a recurring symbol in Poh’s work and here represents activism. The people in the film speak of their fears, of dying without legal recognition as partners or parents, but also of their hopes for the futures of their children.
"What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world" is both a plea for the protection of LGBTQ+ families and a meditation on resilience and vulnerability.
Charmaine Poh, What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, 2024
Digital video
14’30’’
© Charmaine Poh
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