Bookends

Art lecturer Ruyi Wong will be showing a video work at art exhibition The Wormhole.
Art lecturer Ruyi Wong will be showing a video work at art exhibition The Wormhole. PHOTO: WIL NG

Who: Artist Ruyi Wong, 29, will be showing a new video work, The Act Of Watching, which explores how Singaporean film and television have depicted supernatural creatures in the 1980s and 1990s, at an exhibition at Liang Court.

Using past footage, the installation will be set in a room filled with multi-coloured light and fog.

She is showing as part of The Wormhole, an art exhibition organised by aheeoee, an art and design studio, and commissioned by Liang Court. The exhibition is set in an imaginary machiya, a traditional Japanese house, which has allegedly travelled through time and space to land in a mall.

Other multimedia artists involved includes Joo Choon Lin, Ong Kian Peng and Geraldine Kang. The show runs till July 17 at Liang Court. Admission is free.

What books are you reading? Against Interpretation And Other Essays by Susan Sontag. This is not the first time I have read it, but I find myself revisiting this book whenever there are new issues in the world or when I finish a film.

Sontag's On Photography got me started on reading her in university, where I was doing my major in film and she is a figure of courage to me. She went to wars such as the Vietnam War to experience suffering first hand so that she can write about it.

Against Interpretation And Other Essays by Susan Sontag

I like the fact that she changes her mind. She might believe in a certain philosophy, but years later, revisits it and proves herself wrong. I enjoy her writing style and the way she argues her points. She makes bold statements and is not afraid of raising fire, even against what some might consider culturally sensitive topics.

What books would you save from a burning house? I've largely migrated to Kindle, but I would save Women & Experimental Filmmaking, edited by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman. It is a scholarly journal and rare because it features avant-garde women film-makers. Since their works are not recorded, I feel that all the more I should save a book that writes about that.

Women & Experimental Filmmaking, edited by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman

Both books I mentioned help me to keep pushing my art form. I am inspired by these brave women.

• Against Interpretation And Other Essays by Susan Sontag (2009, Penguin Books, $29.91) is available at Books Kinokuniya. Women & Experimental Filmmaking, edited by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (2005, University of Illinois Press, $26.17), is available at www.book depository.com

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on July 03, 2016, with the headline Bookends. Subscribe