Artist Statement
Trained in English Literature with a scholarly focus on esotericism and poetics, I root my artistic practice as a writer and performer in lyrical and emotional impulse—less interested in exposition than in revelation.
My works often take the form of intimate, speculative rituals. They span screenwriting, theatre performances, installations, and experimental storytelling, invoking structures that resist easy classification.
I’m drawn to the ineffable—grief, spirit, memory, myth—and approach these with reverent curiosity, crafting sensory and symbolic experiences that oscillate between immersion and quiet invocation. Recurring themes include longing, divination, and spiritual residue—explored through poetic language, participatory forms, and visual dramaturgy, I aim to create vivid theatrical and filmic encounters that brush against the numinous, inviting audiences to momentarily inhabit the invisible currents that shape inner and collective life.
Across works I’ve examined how the individual psyche intersects with cosmology, ecology, and collective mythos.
Professional Biography
Zoea Tania Chen is a writer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist from Singapore whose work spans theatre, film, installation, and poetic storytelling. She holds an M.A. in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University, where she received the NTU Research Scholarship, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University where she is writing a stage play. Her practice explores themes of grief, divination, memory, and the metaphysical through lyrical, participatory forms that blur ritual and performance.
She is the co-writer of CA$H, a short film that premiered at the 41st Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and screened at La Guarimba (Italy) and the Golden Harvest Awards (Taiwan).
Her theatre-installation Dear Unknown Friend was commissioned by The Theatre Practice and selected for It’s Not About the Numbers, a curated platform for experimental works. She also wrote Prophecy, a short film commissioned by ArtScience Museum (Singapore) and later screened at Minikino Film Week (Bali).
Other works include Blank Run (ACT Shanghai / World Stage Design, Taipei), Round Round Buns (Taipei/Singapore), and Poppy (National Arts Council, Singapore).
She created and performed How to Disappear (The Veiled Woman) at the Draw to Perform residency (Brighton, UK), which shaped her ongoing interest in ritual dramaturgy. Most recently she worked as a curator Reader for Flesh & Blood Stories, a Wales-based theatre festival initiative supported by the Arts Council of Wales.