@CPR | Likenesses: Speaking with the Selves presented by Goethe-Institut NY

The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present 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, , at the Goethe-Institut New York on view from September 24 to December 4, 2025.

PROGRAM

Li-Ming HuCan 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.Works cited (in order of appearance):

• Trailer for the 2020 film Mulan, directed by Niki Caro
• “Reflection,” performed by Lea Salonga, from Disney's 1998 animated film Mulan (Wilder and Zippel).
• Interview with Lea Salonga, Jonathan Pryce and Terry Wogan, BBC, 1989.
• Photos of 1990 Miss Saigon protests by Corky Lee
• Final scene of M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, directed by David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons. Music “Everything is Destroyed” by Howard Shore and a Casiotone cover of “Un Bel Di Vedremo” by Puccini (from his opera Madame Butterfly)

Charmaine Pohin 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 PohSomewhere 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.

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