FACULTYSalty Xi Jie Ng
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.
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.