Re-organising art museum's collection of 5,000 books

ARTIST Loo Zihan likes to organise and sequence information, and he also has a passion for unpacking obscure knowledge. Give him access to the Singapore Art Museum's resources centre, and voila, his art installation represents exactly that - a re-organisation of the museum's some 5,000 books.

What the museum has is a lot of art reference books, catalogues and artists' monograms besides gifts from other art centres and museums. "What interested me is that the reference books, catalogues and artists' monograms are not consciously collected . . . and it's a collection that's been built up under three directors," explains Loo, 32.

He then chose to order the books chronologically, according to when they were published. "In this way, we can see how the focus of the conversation about art shifted over the years. We ca…