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!!! THE INTIMATE VERNACULAR !!!
Salty Xi Jie Ng is an artist, educator, and diasporic body from the tropical metropolis of Singapore, with ancestry tracing to southern China. Serving an enchanted process guided by the noumenal and divinatory, her transdisciplinary practice is an alchemical site in collaboration with people’s lives, individual and shared dream imaginaries, within the interdimensional, intimate vernacular. 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 artists’ lives, 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 durational site-specific project, brief one-on-one encounter, co-created meals, performances, rituals, films, writing, conversations, publications, and community space. x Salty is the 2024 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for social practice artists from the Headlands Centre for the Arts. 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/ Finland/ Denmark/ Norway), 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. - Her 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 variety show made in collaboration with prisoners in Columbia River Correctional Institution in Portland OR, USA. She was the 2020-21 editor of Conversations On Everything / Social Forms of Art Journal, a Portland OR publication, and co-organised Portland's Assembly art and social practice conference. In 2022, she created Baibai Research Group, a transdisciplinary platform operating at the intersections of spirituality, ancestry and relationality. Salty is an akashic records practitioner, offering her services at cosmicfriend.info. She completed Intensive I at the Center for Deep Listening, and studies qigong, butoh and Hokkien, her ancestral tongue. |
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