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!!! 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. In hopes of uncovering hidden selves and histories in kinship with the other-than-human, 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. Her constellational manifestations dance across 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. x 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. 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 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. - Birthed in 2022 following a unfolding path of transformational grief, Baibai Research Group is a transdisciplinary platform operating at the intersections of spirituality, ancestry and relationality, exploring deeply alive relationships with the departed and spirit worlds, brewing a "becoming together" (The Grateful Dead, Vinciane Despret) within a new framework of rationality. Manifestations have included the Ancestor Dream Visitation Repository, Ancestor Dream Circles, longform essay, workshops and installations. Having led Both Sides, Now - tides, a year-long arts-based community engagement project on death and dying with seniors in a north Singapore neighbourhood, Salty is now consulting and mentoring artists to engage seniors on this taboo subject with creative curriculum on the end-of-life. Salty's first feature film, Singapore Minstrel, had its international premiere at the Asian American International Film Fest (USA) and won best director of documentary feature at the Indian Cine Film Fest. In 2016, she founded The Grandma Reporter (TGR), a collaborative publication project on senior women's culture around the earth. Developing from the intimacy issue of TGR in Portland Oregon, she was commissioned by Singapore's T:>Works Festival of Women N.O.W. to make Not Grey: Intimacy, Ageing & Being with senior women. In 2019, she co-created and co-directed The Inside Show, a radical variety show made in collaboration with and centering the voices and creative visions of incarcerated individuals at Columbia River Correctional Institution in Portland OR. Salty is an akashic records practitioner researching quantum consciousness, offering her services at cosmicfriend.info. She is being certified with the Center for Deep Listening, and studies qigong, butoh and Hokkien, her ancestral tongue. She is a proud member of the Singapore Butoh Collective. |
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