!!! THE INTIMATE VERNACULAR !!!
Salty Xi Jie Ng is an artist, performer, researcher, educator, akashic records practitioner, and diasporic body from the tropical metropolis of Singapore, with ancestry tracing to southern China. Serving an enchanted process guided by the mantic and divinatory, her transdisciplinary practice is an alchemical site in collaboration with people and their lives; the interdimensional, intimate vernacular; individual and shared dream imaginaries. She tends to the erotic, ancestry, ageing, the inner worlds of older women, the end-of-life, and relationships with the departed and spirit worlds, while examining artistic labour and what gets to be called art.
Her practice proposes a collective re-imagining through humour, subversion, discomfort, institutional critique, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. She has developed a playful, provocative and tender spectrum of work across cultures and contexts, locally and internationally, in forms like ritual, gathering, community space, performance, durational process, brief one-on-one encounter, co-created meal, butoh, film, video, installation, writing, conversation, meditation, publication and score.
Salty is the 2024 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for social practice artists from the Headlands Centre for the Arts, and the 2025 Arts Research Scholar-in-Residence at Nanyang Academy of Fine Art - University of the Arts Singapore.
Salty researches quantum consciousness through oracular practice, offering readings at cosmicfriend.info. She is a certified facilitator with the Center for Deep Listening in the lineage of Pauline Oliveros, studies Butoh and Qigong primarily in the Wild Goose lineage. She is part of syrup, a collective of multidisciplinary femme Singaporean artists exploring the erotic, as well as one half of the Artists' Institute for Quantum Kinship, a duo working in the intersections of art, divination, and creative support.
She has been artist-in-residence at spaces such as Singapore Art Museum, 136GOETHELAB / Goethe-Institut Singapore, Taipei Artist Village / Treasure Hill (Taiwan), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's College of Visual & Performing Arts (USA), Kaman Art Foundation (India), Arteles Creative Centre (Finland), Elsewhere Museum (USA), Signal Fire (USA), and Buangkok Square, a Singaporean mall. She was Artist Fellow at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park.Her work has been supported by diverse platforms and spaces such as Shedhalle (Switzerland), Museum Why (Sweden), Arko Art Musuem (Korea), Mi Hak Gwan (Korea), King School Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), Singapore International Film Festival, and Community for Positive Aging (USA). Salty received the National Arts Council Postgraduate Scholarship (Singapore, 2016), Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize (USA, 2017) and an Honourable Mention for the Impart Art Prize (Singapore, 2022).
As an educator, she has taught and guest-lectured in institutions in the U.S. and Singapore. She has an MFA in Art + Social Practice from Portland State University, and currently teaches in the program.
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Selected press / writing about
- Not your grandmother’s tabloid: The Grandma Reporter tackles sex and eroticism, Oregon ArtsWatch, 2026
- Speak Dialect Campaign? Gen Z and millennials on quest to reclaim grandmother tongues, The Straits Times, 2024
- Tiding Over Conversations About Death: Salty Xi Jie Ng’s Approach to Socially Engaged Art, Plural Art Mag, 2024
- Meet a 77-year-old cosmic philosopher from Yishun in community art show on end-of-life matters, The Straits Times, 2024
- Salty Xi Jie Ng Seeks To Provoke, Jom Media, 26 August 2022
- Self and Society in Singapore Contemporary Art: An Intersectional Exploration of Identity Politics Among Emerging Singaporean Artists by Lum Chee Hoo, Juliette Lizeray, Ching Chor Leng; Nanyang Technological University-National Institute of Education, Singapore, 2023
- A Performance Lecture: Dear Singapore Art Museum Acquisition Committee; Art & Market, Singapore Art Week Dialogues 2022
- Citizen Scholar of the Cosmos, Episodes 36 and 37; Change the Story / Change the World podcast, Center for the Study of Art & Community, USA, 2021
- Cakap-Cakap: Interview with Salty Xi Jie Ng – Arts Equator, Singapore, July 2021
- To Be Seen When You’re Invisible: What Intimacy Means To Older Women – Rice Media, Singapore, July 2021
- Making Micro Utopias -– Brack, April 2020
- Inside Jokes: How a prison comedy program featuring Fred Armisen has helped transform inmates’ lives; The Progressive, USA, 2020
- The Inside Show, OR Arts Watch, Portland OR, USA, 2019
- Online project bids farewell to Sungei Road flea market, The Straits Times, Singapore, 2017
- Foreign Workers Get Some Tender Loving Care, The Straits Times, Singapore, 2016
- Busk in Limelight: Singapore Minstrel in S’pore Intl Film Fest, TODAY, Singapore, 2015
