About Me

Ellie Chung’s artistic practice is centered around the mental and physical sensations surrounding emotion. Through her works, Chung attempts to both visualize and convey the intangible phenomena that occurs within people throughout the events of their everyday lives. A primary motivation for this strong focus on intangible human elements arises from her innate difficulty to put such phenomena into accurately descriptive words, leading to Chung’s reliance on imagery to express these experiences, and interest in how others physically perceive their emotions. Chung primarily uses 2D mediums such as paintings, drawings, and digital illustrations. While words present a definitive message, visuals bypass these barriers created by language. This leaves enough unsaid that viewers are invited to blend their own experiences with Chung’s, creating a unique conversation between viewer and artist. For her, 2D bridges this mental and physical gap in a way that encourages this conversation.

Chung aims to create pieces that represent emotions, as well as elicit them in the viewer. This focus has prevailed consistently across Chung’s artistic portfolio – through investigations of the relationship between fear and desire and attempts to depict physical manifestations of raw emotions, among others. These depictions aim to tie mental feelings with their accompanying physical sensations – a suffocation in the chest from deep sadness, a tingling numbness through the arms and head from anticipation, a deafening roar and static behind the eyes from rage.