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Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves (2025)
Two-person exhibition
Site-specific installations, video, performance, objects 
Goethe-Institut New York 

Exhibition





Installation photos: Marc Tatti 

Description below taken from Goethe-Institut New York 

The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves, a two-artist exhibition featuring Li-Ming Hu (b. 1987 in New Zealand, lives in New York City) and Charmaine Poh (b. 1990 in Singapore, lives in Berlin). This exhibition is the first pairing of their works.

Central to this exhibition is a biographical experience shared by both artists—television fame at a young age. In the 2000’s, Hu received a breakout role on New Zealand’s popular soap-opera, Shortland Street, and was later cast as the silver operator on Power Rangers RPM, among other roles. Similarly, Poh starred as the character E-Ching in a hit Singaporean children’s detective show, We are R.E.M., around the same time. Coinciding with the unmoderated internet of Web 1.0, both artists experienced a great deal of prejudice and hate alongside their fame, ranging from racial typecasting to sexual harassment and cyberbullying, sometimes breaking the fourth wall of the screen and spilling over into real life.

Hu’s and Poh’s works on display in this exhibition respond to this time in their lives. Revisiting their former roles, the artists now use performance, installation, and video to re-create and manipulate the context in which their likenesses were used. Hu utilizes humor and absurdity to examine the performance of identity and the particular demands made of minoritized subjects, often remarking on behind-the-scenes activities and metacognitive reflections. Poh, on the other hand, often situates her experience in Eastern and Western philosophical terms, and employs emergent technologies, such as the deepfake and chatbot, to give voice to her younger self and say now what she could not then.

Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves foregrounds not only the parasocial relationship that viewers have with television characters, but also the (dis)connection that actors have with their past roles. Chatrooms and social media have given an unprecedented sense of intimacy between the viewer and the subject, further blurring the boundary between character and actor in their eyes. What, then, can the actor do when the image rights to television shows and commercial reels lie within the purview of faceless corporations? How, then, can one take back control of one's image? While Hu and Poh diverge in their strategies to answer these questions, they remain steadfast in their efforts to reclaim and maintain agency over their likenesses—both past and present.

Curated by Zachary B. Feldman
Graphic design by Moritz Kreul

List of works presented by Charmaine Poh:


Performances




The Goethe-Institut New York presents an evening of performances featuring Li-Ming Hu (b. 1987 in New Zealand, lives in New York City) and Charmaine Poh (b. 1990 in Singapore, lives in Berlin). These performances are held in conjunction with the exhibition, Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves, at the Goethe-Institut New York on view from September 24 to December 4, 2025.

PROGRAM
Li-Ming Hu
Can It Be I'm Not Meant To Play This Part? (2024), performance, video, 30 min.
Combining narration, reenactment, found footage, karaoke, animation and a sprinkling of augmented reality, Li-Ming Hu’s Can It Be I'm Not Meant To Play This Part? explores representation, identity and cultural production through the artist’s experiences as a professional actor and emerging artist, in conversation with key moments in the history of Asian American theater.

Charmaine Poh
in the shadow of the cosmic (2023), performance-lecture, video, 30 min.
in the shadow of the cosmic is a performance-lecture exploring the multiplicity of the avatar. Expanding Poh's YOUNG BODY series, the character E-Ching is placed in conversation with vocal clones, anime characters, 3D influencers, and other entities in a vast digital constellation. The performance-lecture traces a technological lineage from the East Asian economic miracle of the 1980s and '90s and the emergence of techno-orientalism, positing that the digital image of the East Asian femme body was borne at a confluence of these historical flows. Pertinent to the work is the recursive logic of Daoism, in which image, self and cosmology reverberate in endless loops. Combining video, live performance and sound, in the shadow of the cosmic is a call to re-open questions of being and becoming.

Motion graphics: Jawn Chan
Audio generation: Jawn Chan, Ashley Hi
3D animation: Brandon Tay
Movement artists: Robyn Wong Min Xuan and Kay Yoon
Music (the track, Mutualism): Anise

Li-Ming Hu & Charmaine Poh
Somewhere In Between Asian and British (2025), performance, 15 min.
This collaborative performance takes the Singaporean accent as a point of departure. Poh, Singapore-born, and Hu, whose mother is Singaporean, explore topics ranging from typecasting and codeswitching to post-colonial politics and diasporic experiences.

Somewhere In Between Asian and British is commissioned by the Goethe-Institut New York for the exhibition Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves.

Conversation on The Brooklyn Rail



The New Social Environment #1293
Recorded on Friday, November 14, 2025 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

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