b i o g r a p h y

WeiZen has been devising and presenting performances since 1999. Her practice has expanded from music-visual concerts, to solo and participatory works which lean towards spaces of uncertainty between performance, ritual and installation.  Increasingly, she has ventured into participatory, durational and/or material installation to capture the traces, the aftermath of a performance; to evoke a landscape for witnesses to inhabit before and after the performance sessions. These works search out the interrelatedness between the body as a moving vessel for history and memory, materiality in human culture, and the psycho-philosophical culture of space and place. She investigates methods for accessing the memory-body through vocal-bodywork, improvisational techniques and re-imagined psycho-physical states of spirit possession rituals she has witnessed as part of her ongoing research process; perceiving that the potency these rituals hold can expand our perspective and insight, needed for social transformation and empowerment.

WeiZen presented a commissioned site-specific and iterative performance artwork material : brick ~ material : body as part of the exhibition ‘An Offering, A Burning, A Prayer’ curated by Con Gerakaris (13 Feb – 29 March 2026).  She reconfigured heritage building materials salvaged from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s recent demolition and renovation work, initiating them as collaborators in her improvisational performances throughout the duration of the exhibition.  In collaboration with Alan Schacher, WeiZen returned from projects using different approaches of engaging with Bantul and Ciburial communities in Indonesia through the process of walking to elicit memory and stories: Memory Walks II (Dec 2025-Jan2026, the second in the series) with Mella Jaarsma in Yogyakarta, and Walk With Me, Ciburial : Being and Place (Jan 2026) facilitated by Gelanggang Olah Rasa (GOR) in Bandung.  In 2025, she was invited to be the co-executive curator and performance artist for Paris Live Art Tour 10 in partnership with Rue Française Plateforme créative pour l'art, creating 9 public space performance interventions in Paris, Fontainebleau, and Art Basel at the Grand Palais. In the same year, WeiZen co-initiated Tracing Embodied Histories through the Waterways’ Memories of Tainan hosted by “Absence Space” in Tainan, with Taiwanese artists Craphone Liu, Kwan-Ying Chen, Shi-Min Sun, ShiYing Hu & Ting-Yung Chang, as well as Braunschweig and Rotterdam artists Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith and ieke Trinks. This project was supported by Tainan City Government Cultural Affairs Bureau.

WeiZen has presented Purge II in September 2024 as part of a Willoughby City Council curated group exhibition called UNBROKEN GESTURES. Purge II was a commissioned sculptural installation examining cultural hunger and durational symbolic actions, generated and modified in two durational public performances, using the materials butterfly pea flowers, turmeric root, cooked glutinous black rice, bamboo straws, handmade paper by WeiZen and Primrose Paper Arts, blotting paper, wooden frame, glass jars and bottles.

In August 2024, as part of HAND UNMADE, she re-devised the subtle beings - emergence, a vocal, movement and installation performance using pig skin embedded with synthetic horse hair, where she re-imagines a Rungus dance ritual from Kampung Minyak, Sabah in Malaysian Borneo.  WeiZen undertook a Rotterdam research residency in June 2024, exploring the framework of Being and Place by inviting local residents through 'Walk with me, Rotterdam', for Performance Art Event (PAE). This culminated in an ensemble improvisational event with the walker-participants.

Adapting Stories from the Body (SFTB) #1 into a participatory work, WeiZen utilised the public space surrounding the Maman sculpture, and the North Wing site, for the opening and closing programme for the Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition at the Art Gallery NSW in 2023 and 2024.  She and Ryuichi Fujimura also co-devised a 3-hour performance titled Pink Regenesis of the Curse, for the lower grounds of White Bay Power Station, at the EDGE Inner West, 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024). 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art commissioned a performance-installation titled Amulet Body as part of a 7-week group exhibition, which included two participatory ritual performances in the gallery, and weekly divination performance sessions for passersby on the streets of Haymarket, Sydney’s Chinatown.

Other works include: Sounds Like Divination I, II, III, and other material/object-body performance interventions in Manhattan public sites as part of Immersive, New York Live Art Tour 8 (2023); embodiments suburbia with Dagmar I. Glausnitzer-Smith in Amsterdam’s public spaces (2024); Evaporative Body, Multiplying Body with Alan Schacher for Keir Choreographic Award (2022); Stories from the Body #1-#10, performed from 2014-2023 in Indonesia, Malaysia, Setouchi Triennale in Japan, Thailand, and in Australia for SOFT CENTRE Unfurl, Sydney Contemporary, Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, Cementa Turns 10 and Carriageworks Nights CONSENT; the subtle beings (Australia 2018) with research undertaken in Sabah and Hanoi, and The Invisibles (360VR film 2020). WeiZen was an AIR in Cementa Festival 2022 to present a social-installation work, Dying - Differently, Possibly. She was also an artist-initiator for cross-disciplinary performance events and residency concepts like SoundBitesBody (2012-2016: properties throughout the Blue Mountains), Performature : Performateur #1, #2, #3, #4 (2019-2022: Articulate project space, Splinter festival, StSt.ari, 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art), and more recently in 2025 ineffable - an open group process at Balmain Town Hall.

g e n e r a l p r a c t i c e

“I draw inspiration from the premise that human living is performed and performative; to activate this process through the vocal-body and its memory, contextualised within its geocultural history.  As an open-disciplinary performance deviser and vocalist since 1999, I expanded into the practice of spatial-body relationship through choreography, via BodyWeather and Pancha Tanmantra 5 Element principles.  In 2010, I began formalising a spirit-corporeal vocabulary generated through contemplation on mortality.  Building a line of inquiry through research residencies and witnessing of rituals, whilst devising for locations across Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Thailand, I secured a research grant which led me to female shamanry communities in Sabah (Malaysia) and Hanoi (Vietnam).  This culminated in a 2018 participatory performance-installation, t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s.

Increasingly, I include participatory and/or material installation to capture the traces, the aftermath of a performance. These works search out the interrelatedness between the body as a moving vessel for history and memory, materiality in human culture, and the psycho-philosophical culture of space and place.”