︎ GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2021-2023), video, 6mins
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.
Technical director: Jon Chan
Link available upon request.
︎ in the shadow of the cosmic (2023), performance-lecture, video, 30mins
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.
in the shadow of the cosmic is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Proof of Personhood: Identity & Authenticity in the Face of AI at Singapore Art Museum.
Motion graphics: Jawn Chan
Audio generation: Jawn Chan, Ashley Hi
3D animation: Brandon Tay
Movement artists: Sonia Kwek and Chloe Chotrani
Music (the track, Mutualism): Anise
Documentation link available upon request.
︎ pixel-code, flesh-bone (2022), performance-lecture
pixel-flesh, code-bone traces contemporary technological developments vis-a-vis the possibilities of the avatar, framed by the bodily presence of E-Ching, and thus by extension, the artist herself. Using multiple modalities of the image, voice, and chatbots, the performance-lecture considers the politics of the Young Girl in a critique of the agency of our techno-selves.
pixel-flesh, code-bone was developed through the Goethe-Institut Singapore residency in Nov-Dec 2022.
Collaborators: Sonia Kwek, Jon Chan, Chok Si Xuan
Documentation link available upon request.
︎ Girlhood (2022), table-top role-playing game
Girlhood was developed through the Goethe-Institut Singapore residency in Nov-Dec 2022.
Collaborators: Sonia Kwek, Jon Chan, Chok Si Xuan
︎ bubble (2022-2023)
bubble is an interactive chatbot featuring the character E-Ching as she leads the participant through a series of questions and answers. Using trust, access, and rejection as underpinning tools, the chatbot allows for numerous outcomes depending on the participant’s willingness to share vulnerabilities, thereby addressing notions of power, authority, and service.
Chatbot customization: Ashley Hi, Chok Si Xuan
︎ public solitude (2022), 2-channel video installation
public solitude is a two-channel video contemplating the manifestations of E-Ching following prompts related to desirability, performance, and reality. Drawing from dramaturgical pedagogy, Stanislavski’s theory of public solitude as a means of freeing the actor from an audience, as well as the politics of the public gaze, the two channels are a correspondence of conflicting values surfacing the (im)possibilities of freedom.
Technical director: Jon Chan
Dramaturg: Sonia Kwek
Link available upon request.
︎ How To Be A Little Girl On The Internet (2022), workshop
How To Be A Little Girl On The Internet is a request for patchworked wisdom on pixellated agency, body safety, and reclamation. The workshop situates the participant in engagement with the character-avatar E-Ching as they navigate potholes of web highways - image circulation, puberty in public, fetishised flesh, and more - and re-route themselves to emancipatory possibilities. Grounded and steered by various cyber-feminist texts, the workshop is an attempt to shape itself into a multi-modal treatise on contemporary gendered online life.
This workshop was produced through Workshopables.