About Teresa Chen

Teresa Chen is a Zurich-based independent visual artist working predominantly in the medium of photography.

She uses her camera to investigate the world and often prefers the extreme close-up view. Her photographs of nature and the human body often use unusual scale or an uncommon perspective to transform the familiar into something foreign. Her earlier work was often directly autobiographical. In numerous series, she photographed herself or used photos of her family and parents, who were Chinese immigrants to the USA.

When scanning surfaces, the artist consciously avoids the conventions that define the classical concept of beauty. In fascinating compositions, she often combines the beautiful with the disgusting, harmonious, or erotic situations with deformed or possibly dangerous ones. She prefers to move in this tension between beauty and mortality, aesthetics and alienation, in order to create ambiguity and uncertainty.

She has degrees from Brown University and Zurich University of Arts and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Plymouth (in collaboration with Zurich University of Arts) in 2014 with a dissertation entitled Between Selves and Others: Exploring Strategic Approaches within Visual Art.

Teresa Chen has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has been the recipient of international residencies and art awards and has work in many public collections.