Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: Mapping Memory, Chaos, and Belonging
Born in Sierra Leone to Lebanese parents, Zen “Zeez” Shweiry has been painting and sharing his artwork for almost two decades. Without following the formal path of an art degree, he has built an instinctive and deeply personal visual language, one shaped by migration, memory, rupture, and return. His work moves freely between figurative and abstract expression, combining acrylics with touches of pastel, ink, drawing, and digital illustration.
As Kulturnest, we see Zeez’s paintings as immediately recognizable through their bold colours, graphic lines, dense compositions, and restless sense of movement. His canvases often feel like emotional maps: layered territories where faces, symbols, buildings, streets, bodies, eyes, spirals, and fragmented architectural forms collide. Nothing appears still. Space bends, perspective breaks open, and familiar elements become charged with psychological tension.
Across his work, there is a constant negotiation between place and displacement. Having spent much of his life outside Lebanon, Zeez’s earlier practice reflected questions of exile, nostalgia, cultural memory, and belonging. His return to Lebanon shifted this gaze inward and closer to home. The national, local, and cultural landscape became more present, not as a fixed identity, but as a living, unstable, and often wounded space.
His paintings can be read as visual conversations between the macrocosm and the microcosm: the city and the self, collective history and personal trauma, homeland and inner landscape. Urban and rural forms merge. Architecture becomes emotional. The body becomes a site of memory. Spirals, symbols, arrows, eyes, and repeated geometric patterns suggest movement, confusion, surveillance, protection, and transformation.
There is a playful energy in Zeez’s work, but also an underlying intensity. His compositions often carry the feeling of trying to rebuild meaning from fragments. Lines overlap like routes, scars, borders, or nervous systems. Colour becomes celebration and alarm. His visual world is vivid, crowded, and alive, reflecting the complexity of a place and a person shaped by movement, crisis, imagination, and survival.
Most recently, Zeez has expanded into digital illustration, developing concepts that differ from his canvas paintings while preserving the same curiosity for character, symbolism, space, and cultural expression. Whether working with acrylic, pastel, ink, or digital tools, his practice remains rooted in a desire to question belonging, reimagine Lebanese visual culture, and transform chaos into a language of its own.
Interview
Kulturnest: Can you introduce yourself through your artistic journey rather than your biography? What key moments or shifts have shaped your practice?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: My artistic journey started with drawing imaginary characters inspired by comics. Later on, this shifted toward drawing human anatomy and other objects, which helped me develop a better sense of form, movement, and proportion.
Over time, my practice moved from character-based drawing into painting, abstraction, and visual storytelling. I became more interested in how space, memory, and emotion could be translated into shapes, lines, colours, and symbols.
Kulturnest: How would you describe your artistic language — your mediums, techniques, and way of working? What draws you to these forms of expression?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: My favourite medium remains acrylic, followed by pastel. I also use ink and, more recently, digital illustration.
In terms of technique, I work through a combination of drawing, painting, and digital illustration, though not necessarily in that order. Sometimes the process begins with a line, sometimes with colour, and sometimes with an idea or image that keeps returning to me.
I am drawn to mediums that allow movement, layering, and spontaneity. Acrylic gives me speed and intensity. Pastel and ink allow me to add gesture, texture, and detail. Digital illustration opens another space where I can explore concepts differently from canvas painting.
Kulturnest: What themes, questions, or inner tensions are currently driving your work? Are there ideas you find yourself returning to?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: Being an expat for almost half of my life, my work has often expressed questions of space and belonging, both in the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Recently, and naturally after returning to Lebanon, my interest has become more focused on the national, local, and cultural space, as well as history and heritage. I find myself returning to questions of identity, memory, and how a place shapes us, especially when that place is complex, unstable, and emotionally charged.
My work also deals with the deconstruction of space and perspective, particularly in relation to trauma and PTSD. I am interested in how inner experiences can distort the way we see the world around us.
Kulturnest: Can you walk us through your creative process — from the first impulse to the final piece? What part of this process feels most essential to you?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: The creative process is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable, especially in the early stages of a painting or illustration. I rarely begin with a fully fixed image. The work often builds itself through layers, accidents, revisions, and decisions that happen along the way.
That being said, I believe the finishing touches matter a great deal. They are often what the spectator notices first, and they can change how the whole piece is read. The final details help bring the chaos together.
I am not saying that the process itself is not personally fulfilling. It is. But I think every artist is also eager to finish one journey to begin another, and eventually to grow through that movement.
Kulturnest: How does your context — whether in Lebanon or as part of a wider artistic environment — impact your work? What challenges and opportunities does it create?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: The environment plays a huge role in shaping artistic expression, whether directly or indirectly.
When I was outside Lebanon, my work reflected a sense of loss, nostalgia, and longing for my homeland and culture. After returning to Lebanon, the themes naturally shifted. Living here brings different questions, different pressures, and different emotional triggers.
Can artists avoid being affected by wartime, instability, and human crises around them? I don’t think so. These realities enter the work somehow, even when they are not represented literally. They affect the atmosphere, the tension, the colours, and the way space is constructed or broken down.
Kulturnest: Looking ahead, what directions are you exploring or questioning in your practice? What would you like to evolve or preserve?
Zen “Zeez” Shweiry: I hope that one day I can return to my first passion: drawing characters. I would like to go deeper into the world of animation and explore how my visual language could move beyond the still image.
For the near future, I hope my work, in whichever medium, continues to reflect Lebanese culture with all its diversity, contradictions, and creativity. I want to preserve the energy and spontaneity of my practice while allowing it to evolve into new forms, especially through digital illustration and possibly animation.
I am interested in creating work that feels rooted, but not fixed — work that carries memory, movement, and identity while still leaving space for transformation.
