Between the tide and the screen – opacity, synthetic intimacy and speculative narratives. An interview with artist Charmaine Poh on feeling-with analogue and digital bodies

This interview examines how Singaporean artist Charmaine Poh stages speculative and documentary narratives across performance, film, photography and digital media. Poh′s works propose privacy as a method: softness and opacity produce partial glimpses of lives. Centring queer kinships and communities in Singapore and its diasporas, the conversation traces case studies of her works and exhibitions in which Daoist myth and collective memory meet the present-day realities of queer and migrant bodies. A further key thread is synthetic intimacy, explored through Poh's ongoing series THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE and its recurring character E-Ching, a deepfake avatar modelled on Poh's 12-year-old television self. As companion or double, E-Ching tests the status of the digital body and how relations, empathy and responsibility are organised online. We discuss display ethics and exhibition design, and the frictions of classification regimes and platform policies in Singapore. Positioned within practice-as-research, the interview reflects on how formal strategies and spatial scenography foster feeling-with while maintaining room for privacy, safety and difference.