SINGAPORE — This ongoing show at The Substation styles itself as a combination of an exhibition, a library and a community space.

The show itself is curated by Ho Rui An, Ang Siew Ching and Karen Yeh, and features artists like Ho Tzu Nyen, Susie Lingham, Michael Lee and more. It is very much textual in nature, and a measure of care and patience may be required. Each artist has filled a shelf with books they felt informed their creative practice, and the books on display range from popular fiction and graphic novels to religious and philosophical treatises and hefty tomes on any number of subjects.

Of the texts selected, each artist then re-writes one, looping back to overwrite, in a sense, a text which was important in moulding the sort of artist they have since become. The manner of re-writing is open to a great deal of interpretation. For instance, Sze Yenn Cheong’s version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science takes the form of annotated diagrams, while Debbie Ding’s taken techniques used to craft spam e-mail to re-write her own book, generating a text with uncanny similarities and differences from the source text.

In a sense, the show as a whole turns an old criticism of contemporary art on its head — that artists these days are too clever by half, with cryptic allusions to literature and philosophy waiting to trip up the unwary viewer. Well, here all the references are in plain sight, to be read and discussed at any pace you please, in what might be described as an excellent, fairly specialised library.

However, for a project ostensibly concerned with extracting the book from its prevailing condition of stillness and rethinking it via notions of speed, motility and rhythm, there does seem to be an unusually strong attachment to the idea of books as actual bits of paper stuck together. And with the experience of moving them around, reading them and talking about them, it means these experiences take on a sense of ritualism in an age of non-print-based books.

The Artist, The Book, And The Crowd runs until Aug 11, noon to 8pm, The Substation Gallery. Closed on public holidays. Free admission.