Maria Jeona Zoleta is as polluted as the islands of the Philippines...
Hello Cyberplanet, Interwebs...Come closer...If you dare..
I'm Maria Jeona Zoleta—a Filipina exorcist of possessed paintings from the streets of Metro Manila.
I make “cute but nasty” worlds inhabited by girlish monsters, unruly bodies and everyday ghosts.
My practice begins with painting and spills into fluorescent sculpture, installation, textiles, performance, noise, DIY video and artist books.
I’m drawn to the images and stories that surround me: Catholic symbols, cartoons, internet culture, dreams and the everyday chaos of Manila. I like taking things that feel familiar and letting them become funny, uncomfortable or a little possessed.
I was born in Manila in 1989 and studied painting at the University of the Philippines Diliman. My work has been shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, MIAM in Sète, France, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, where I received the Thirteen Artists Award in 2015.
In 2021, I was part of the MAIIAM Southeast Asian Fellowship at The Alternative Art School, where I studied alternative art histories with Gridthiya Gaweewong and community-building with Marinella Senatore
Beyond the studio, I run Possessed Planets, my independent publishing project and travelling library, and co-founded Bizarre Bookstore with AIM, a Tokyo based artist.
Through POSSESSED!, I also create temporary spaces for workshops, performance, music and gathering.
Welcome to my planet. Please make yourself uncomfortable. ♡
Pain here? Lots!
Masturbate2monsters take you on a ride where...
Some monsters are cute. Some are creepy. The interesting ones don’t bother choosing.
Here - Maria Jeona Zoleta brings together paintings, drawings, installations and photographs she has been making since she was five. What started as a diary is now becoming a book to be released at TABF in 2027 with Randomman, the series opens the door to a world of strange bodies, mischievous creatures and images that might make you laugh before you realize they’re looking back at you.
Somewhere underneath it all is a childhood memory that some with faint hearts would could call traumatic: a pearl, an encounter with doctors, and the strange feeling of being small while other people paid very close attention to her body. Zoleta lets that feeling change shape, turning it into images that are playful, uncomfortable, colorful and difficult to pin down.
Across the book, works made years apart meet like old friends—or monsters who have been waiting a long time to be introduced. Together, they form a personal archive of curiosity, fantasy and all the wonderfully weird things an imagination can do when left to its own devices.
You, I am talking to Y-O-U / A hole
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 5 ft x 5 ft, 2008
A huge face looks straight back at you. I wanted the encounter to feel close, intimate and a little impossible to escape.
JUST ALWAYS PRAY AT NIGHT J.A.P.A.N.
Oil on Canvas, 30.48x30.48 cm 2026
A figure sits in a red-orange world beside a small glowing figure. The title turns the word JAPAN into a little prayer an acronym just like F.L.A.M.E.S.
Periodic Pearls in Prison, sculpture part of Scenes from the Land of the Strange, 2010-11
Wet Ones
4x5 ft Oil and acrylic on canvas
Bodies of creatures that seem like women and children, and a little house share a purple landscape, as if everyone has wandered into the same strange dream.
Feeling the Earth Heading Towards Me 4x5 ft Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 2022
It is dusk and lush green, and mossy while a snail looks out on a young figure with pony tail looks out in the landscape to the background where it seems like a forest, swans transform into another that submerges underwater, shapeshifting towards the foreground to the glowing mushrooms, to the tall grass, to relax or to be bitten by a puff adder? On the side there is somebody who's behind is visible carrying crocs towards an unknown path that disappears in the frame, as the rain starts to pour from Left to Right......A drop of blood is suspended in animation.
Microsluts Toxic Shock, 2024, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
Installation of paintings from the exhibition, Dirty Ice Cream in A Poor Party, 2025 at Artist Unlimited, Bielefeld, Germany
During my time there from June - August, I made these works thinking about the end of the world as we all know it from the internet. I want to make an embodiment of procreation and pollution in one image. Legs sprawling open, flooded, cars floating, the nuclear bomb exploding as the sun sets, while a woman prays to a burning cross...Another female figure is hugging an electric phallic figure ...as if in prayer, as if protecting something vulnerable, as if in submission...
AS IF...AS IF! If only... WHAT IF!
This is Philippines!
Small paintings of vulvas and feline creatures are hung like stickers on the bigger unstretched painting, 6 by 9 feet, as if pets and furries can comfort and ease the pain of confrontation...
