GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY

The video uses as its basis found footage and material of the artist’s time as a preteen TV actor in the early 2000s in Singapore, a time of an unregulated internet and nascent image distribution. Through the use of a deep-fake, the video resurrects the series character, E-Ching, to address the politics of the gaze, the femme-presenting body, and agency. By compressing time and space, the eternal 12-year-old E-Ching offers a revisionist narrative that holds a yearning for freedom.

  • Charmaine Poh
    Director
  • Charmaine Poh
    Writer
  • Charmaine Poh
    Producer
  • Charmaine Poh
    Key Cast
  • Jonathan Chan
    VFX
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short, Web / New Media
  • Genres:
    Non-fiction, Performance-lecture
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 23 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 15, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    2,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Singapore
  • Country of Filming:
    Singapore
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Charmaine Poh

Charmaine Poh is an artist from Singapore working across media, moving image, and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. Her current focus, THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE, is a series of enactments considering the potentialities of the feminist techno-body. Her work centres the affects of vulnerability, desire, and intimacy from the vantage point of subversion. Charmaine grew up as an actor studying international relations and visual anthropology. She developed a photography practice using documentary and ethnographic methodologies before looping back into using performance as a driving force. The birth of THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE stems from the artist’s experience as a child actor in Singapore in the early 2000s.

She is a co-founder of the magazine Jom. In the fall of 2022, she started her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is a 2023 Oberhausen Seminar participant and a 2023 Flaherty Online Fellow.

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Director Statement

Charmaine’s questions are of the intimacies of identity caught in the crosshairs of larger, looming systems. Of central concern is the problematics of the gaze, whether heteronormative, techno-orientalist and/or public. She works towards her work being a transformative, reparative space for herself and others in and of itself, both through its presentation and production creating protopic recursive loops. She is informed by reflexive ethnography, documentary practice, and the ethics of representation. As the series grows to include more characters who have borne the brunt or and/or produced media cultures, these principles continue to serve as crucial compasses.

Underlining her work is both an experiment with the vehicle of form and the translation of an experience. Drawn to both research and the visceral, her work finds resonance in that which glistens in the slipperiness between genres and mediums. It is thus in both the trembling emotional undertones of vulnerability and the playful disobedience of resistance that her work finds a home.