Charmaine Poh
Singapore/Berlin

As a former child actress, Chinese-Singaporean artist Charmaine Poh has long been attuned to the myriad issues surrounding virtual ownership and representation. Now engaged in visual arts, her body of work includes photography, filmmaking, performance, and AI, mediums that overlap with her PhD on queer, Asian bodies and their digital manifestations.

Poh’s research at the Free University of Berlin, where she explores the intersections between Asian philosophies such as Taoism and the contemporary theory of techno-orientalism, lays the conceptual bedrock for her artmaking. Most emblematic of these themes is her project THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE (2021– ), in which Poh interrogates how digital imagery portrays East Asian femme bodies by employing a deepfake avatar of herself. Named “E-Ching” after her real-life character on the television series We Are R.E.M. (2003–08), Poh’s techno-body reclaims the agency that her preteen-self lacked during filming. Fittingly, she debuted the deepfake in How To Be A Little Girl On the Internet (2022), a participatory workshop that explored how young women can navigate digital safety and autonomy amid virtual violence.