Arts: Berlin celebrates Charmaine Poh

Next to the State Opera House in the heart of Berlin, Germany’s capital, is Prinzessinnenpalais, an 18th-Century neoclassical building built for Prussian royalty. In 2018, Deutsche Bank converted it into PalaisPopulaire, a cultural hub that also houses its art collection. On Wednesday evening, amid the Berlin Art Week, it was thronging with well-heeled, besuited Germans, who moved between cocktail tables cradling pretzel sticks, yellow and red sunflowers, and chalices of bubbly. In one corner, looking slightly out of place in more dazzling dress, was a group of South-east Asians. All were there to celebrate the opening of the first solo exhibition by Charmaine Poh, the bank’s artist of the year.

In the circular space at the foot of a stunning spiral staircase is the first work. A projection from above illuminates the floor with blue waves, gently washing over a white poem (from Madeleine Thien, who was quoting lao tzu and william stafford).

heavy is the root of light
as the old philosophers say
how we stand here is important
how we breathe

It’s a fitting welcome to Charmaine’s world. Water, standing “for life, for a soft but persistent energy”, is the element that accompanies many of her narratives, which explore themes around agency, identity, femininity, and queerness. The fluidity of water and interpretability of words prods us to seek meaning behind the obvious. And from a Taoist line emerges another motif: of inner power, peace, and liberation.

The palace’s entire second floor, accessed by brushing your way through a phantasmagorical, psychedelic curtain, is filled with works that exemplify her multimedia, multigenre talent. Some have been seen in Singapore, like photographs of the “Majie”, Cantonese migrant domestic workers who’d taken a vow not to marry; and her deepfake video avatar, E-Ching, which leverages footage from her child-acting career to subvert the online violence she faced, in the process interrogating the male gaze and notions around our different selves, while hinting at pathways to restitution, for all struggling to cope with the absurdities and abuse of the online life. By contrast, a documentary on queer parents in Singapore, commissioned for last year’s Venice Biennale, is now on public display in Berlin but, outrageously, can be screened only to those 21 and up in the very place it was filmed.

Charmaine’s primary new work is “The Moon is Wet”, a series of three films, each narrated by a different protagonist in a different language: the sea goddess Mazu, a Majie, and Monic, an Indonesian domestic worker. Moving from downtown Singapore to the beach and mangrove forests, in varied, stunning cinematography, it combines numerous currents of the Singapore story, from migration to reclamation, with water, tides and the planet’s broader circadian rhythms toying with one’s conception of time, of spiritual ancestry and descent. The video is a three-channel installation; the viewer stands in a circular room, surrounded by three big screens, and can only reasonably see one of three perspectives, for each successive chapter. From grand ecological decay to individual human pain on an eight-day migration to Singapore, we’re left wondering which angle we’ve missed. But the moments of joy—Mazu catching a whiff of “this southern sea’s briny air”, creatures crawling in the intertidal, Monic falling in love with a woman and forgetting her troubles in a KTV joint—remind us of why we live.

Editor’s note: “Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take” is on till February 23rd 2026. When we told her we intend to write this, Charmaine was concerned about Jom being seen as promoting the work of one of our co-founders. While we appreciate her concerns about editorial conflicts of interest, they are outweighed by this publication’s need to recognise stellar achievement. We are delighted that it’s by one of us.