dream visitation teatime / i dreamt i was a funeral band uncle
Salty Xi Jie Ng
What does it mean to be taught by the alchemy of grief in an everyday existence open to the unseen? This participatory performance-lecture-ritual weaves and activates personal archives and pieces of research into the spirit world and dream imaginaries as paths for reinvention and incarnation.
Ancestor Dream Visitation Repository (托夢庫) is a research experiment collecting, theorising, and translating dream visitations––from ancestors, deities, and more— towards new notions of lineage, remembrance and spirituality for the living, generating knowledge on a widely experienced phenomena lacking discourse.
Dream Visitation Candy (托夢糖) is an edible artwork about the beautiful futility of perfect dream recall, and ancestral and living connections brewing a real kind of spectral magic. Tracing to a late Taiwanese Indigenous chief’s ancestor dream visitations, chief Dawan responded by making wine and collaborated with artist Huang Po-Chih, who gifted Salty the Dream-Inspired Millet Wine (夢啟酒). After prayer and ingestion, Salty received an ancestor dream visitation that led to the confectioning of candy for others to experience their own visitations in a numinous cosmic chain. These works and more make up a cosmology led by a divinatory unfolding in the sacred mundane, where the subtle unseen gently whispers.
Salty Xi Jie Ng (Singapore/Portland) is an artist, researcher, educator, and akashic records practitioner based between Singapore and Portland, Oregon, USA. Serving an enchanted process, her transdisciplinary practice is an alchemical site in collaboration with people, their lives, and the interdimensional, intimate vernacular, manifesting across forms like ritual, gathering, performance, community space, collaborative process, brief encounter, meal, video, installation, writing, publication, and score. She tends to the erotic, ancestry, 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 work has been supported by residencies and spaces internationally, such as Singapore Art Museum, Singapore International Film Festival, Goethe-Institut Singapur, Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Arko Art Museum (Korea), Shedhalle (Switzerland), and Headlands Centre for the Arts (USA). Salty performs butoh, has an MFA in art and social practice from Portland State University, and is the 2024 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for social practice artists.
