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 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, Jong extends mark-making into dimensional and durational territories. Her ink bodies defy gravity and convention, reclaiming the feminine Asian-American body while 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.