Episode 36: Salty Xi Jie Ng - Citizen Scholar of the Cosmos - ACT 1

EpisodePull back the curtain on one of Salty's works and there's no telling what you will find -- a film, a party, an intimate discussion, a festival, a newspaper, a concert, a feast, and more often than, not an invitation to decide whether you want to participate as an audience member. or as part of the show. BIOSalty Xi Jie Ng co-creates semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the intimate vernacular. Often playing with relational possibilities, her interdisciplinary work is manifested from fantasy scores for the present and future that propose a collective re-imagining through humor, care, subversion, play, discomfort, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal. Her practice dances across forms such as brief encounter, collaborative space, variety show, poem, conversation, meal, publication, film, performance.  As a citizen scholar of the cosmos, Xi Jie explores aging, intimacy, food, lineage, identity, ritual and power, while questioning who artists are and what gets to be called art. Her research of everyday as performance bears fruit as tender presentations somewhere between art and life. Centering the body and its histories, she constructs portrayals of self and space that are ambiguous, raw, dream-like, absurd, mundane. At heart she is a cosmic clown, floating at the intersections of wonder and melancholy, existential meditation and devotional nonsense. Notable Mentionshttp://www.crci.art/ (Columbia River Correctional Institution, Creative Initiatives:) Columbia River Creative Initiatives is a series of artist run programs and classes held at the Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon. http://www.fredarmisen.com/ (Fred Armisen): is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and musician. He is best known as a cast member on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Live (Saturday Night Live) from 2002 until 2013.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Armi