ELLEN JONG

Outpour: The Three Shades and Other Ink Bodies

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 10, 6–9 PM

EXHIBITION DATES: January 10 – February 28, 2026

HOURS: Thursday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM

SITUATIONS AT 12.26 LA

3305 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90018

SITUATIONS is presenting Ellen Jong’s Outpour at 12.26 LA from January 10 through February 28 at its Los Angeles location. At the center of the exhibition, The Three Shades features three freestanding, life-sized feminine figures cast in layers of dehydrated ink. Liquid ink flows through the solid forms and drips from the sculptures’ palm, fist, and wrung cloth, audible throughout the space. In Jong's work, ink is formed and may continue to deform. It is not just applied to a surface—it is the surface.

The title references Auguste Rodin’s The Three Shades (1886), a trio of male figures at the entrance to The Gates of Hell. Jong reinterprets this image, replacing despair with agency. Her figures suggest transformation, drawing on historical images of women at fountains while presenting the figures as both source and subject.

The exhibition also includes ink reliefs on paper, made from the silhouettes of ancient Chinese vessels. Thickened, textured, and pierced, the vessels take on corporeal form. In dialogue with The Three Shades, the reliefs explore containment and release, where body and vessel become intertwined.

Jong formulates her own ink using a centuries-old craft of traditional Chinese ink-stick making, the ink she first encountered in childhood painting lessons in Queens, New York.  By transforming a medium historically associated with authority and permanence into one that is responsive and mortal, Jong extends mark-making into three dimensions and duration. Her ink bodies do not claim to last; instead, they defy gravity, form, and convention, reclaiming the feminine Asian-American body, dismantling inherited systems, and constructing new ones.

In Outpour, each work reflects Jong’s ongoing process of change, acknowledging loss while asserting presence. Ink becomes a living, moving material—alive precisely because it cannot be fixed.

ELLEN JONG (b. 1976, Queens, New York) studied at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts. Selected exhibitions include SITUATIONS, New York; New Discretions, New York; Praz-Delavellade Gallery, Los Angeles; Basement 6 Collective Space, Shanghai, China; Shrine Gallery, New York; and Every Woman Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, New York. She is the author of the photographic monographs Pees On Earth (Miss Rosen Edition / powerHouse Books, 2006) and Getting To Know My Husband’s Cock (2010), the latter featured in Self Publish, Be Happy by Bruno Ceschel (Aperture Books). Jong is also a featured artist in Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art: Abjection, Revolt and Objecthood by Keren Moscovitch (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023).