I like thinking that my work instigates performance; it encourages viewers to perform in a multivalent emotional collaboration with it. I create immersive, site specific installations in all media—painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, furniture, murals, video, et al—that create dreamlike, fictional spaces that disrupt reality and present more questions than they answer. While I turn to art as a means of resolving my own identity—allowing my very private inner thoughts and questions to become public—I hope that the humble, honest manner of sharing the work serves viewers by opening up similar opportunities for reverie. I believe that if something exists in the mind, it exists in the world, the trouble seems to only come when we try to reify it. Apparently I like making trouble.
Ellen (Jing) Xu was born (1987) and raised in Inner Mongolia, China. She received a dual degree from Xiamen University, China; her MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle; and has also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. Her work has been exhibited at the ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus, OH; the Seattle Art Museum, Soil Gallery, Interstitial Gallery, and Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle; the Blue Door Art Center in Yonkers, NY; 435 Broome in SoHo, NYC; the Kaufman Arts District in Queens, NYC; Sculptureworks Ferguson in St. Louis, MO; the Helmuth Project in San Diego, CA; and others. Ellen has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; Paul Artspace in St. Louis, MO; and the Wassaic Artist Residency in Wassaic, NY. She was also a Media Arts Fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY.