Novel Ideas of Reading

In gallery space lit by amber and violet, I saw words unmoored from the page. Instead, they wafted around us like confetti. It was a reimagined reading room, a stage with walls fluttering with projected letters and blinking icons that guided visitors through interactive storylines. 

A friend had mentioned an Alice in Wonderland exhibition being presented at the Ewha Womans College student showing, and naturally, we went. Instead of sitting in a chair, reading about Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, we slipped through pastel corridors while holographic playing cards pirouetted across our path. A row of teacups rattled in cheerful dissonance, and we followed the distant giggle of the Cheshire Cat through an actual maze. The experience was playful and slightly disorienting, but I got the sense that that was the intention. I had stepped into a dream made real. 

Meanwhile, libraries and bookstores have taken on fresh lives of their own. At some locations, you can point a phone at a row of classic covers and watch an AR app animate the spines so the book seems to be breathing. Some spaces set up text-based storytelling on digital kiosks, encouraging readers to exchange messages with characters that might be fictional or might be fragments of ourselves—who could be sure anymore? Even pop-up cafés and escape rooms have become themed around bestsellers, so that we incorporate ourselves into communal narratives over latte foam or puzzle locks.

All of this pushes literature beyond just traditional paper. Will these innovations be just as revolutionary as Gutenberg’s printing press? Will these novel ways to interact with words attract a new generation of readers who are otherwise busy with other digital media? Perhaps. But there is also doubt. To what extent does the spectacle of the word steal the soul of the written word? Do we lose the quiet trance of solo reading when the experience is made so theatrical? Still, if anything, these installations suggest a shift in how we learn, how we connect, and how we entertain ourselves: through taste, touch, conversation, and play.

Perhaps in order to survive, literature needs to have a new identity—no longer content to sit and wait on the shelf. In a world driven by screens and constant iterative design changes, maybe that’s the ultimate testament to the power of words: the original World Wide Web and connector of people.

Art – Slippery Slope

Art has been called a universal impulse. People have faith in the romantic notion that art bypasses borders to tap into some primal human core. But does it really? When visual culture migrates—across geographies, histories, or ideologies—something slips away, and something else accrues. To presume art communicates seamlessly is to ignore the messiness of meaning-making. Translation—visual and otherwise—is never a neutral act.  

Take The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s swirling cosmos is interpreted as a metaphor for his personal anguish. Yet here in Asia, the same painting morphs into a meditation of Zen impermanence. I wasn’t aware of the latter interpretation, because the Eurocentric interpretation made a great deal of sense to me. But once I heard the alternative version, I could see it, and once I saw it, I could never un-see Starry Night in the same way again. Like Paris folding in on itself in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the painting enfolded me with two superimposed interpretations.  

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds performs a similar trick. To Western eyes, the sprawling installation—millions of porcelain husks hand-painted by artisans—reads as a biting allegory: individuality swallowed by Maoist conformity, labor exploited under capitalist (or communist) machinery. But in China? The work’s political teeth recede, overshadowed by its material genealogy. We focus on the porcelain itself, a centuries-old craft tradition, or the sunflower’s complicated symbolism as both Mao-era propaganda and a snack shared among friends. The artwork becomes malleable, and the meaning becomes contingent on who’s looking, where they stand, and what they are allowed to comment on.  

This brings us to cultural literacy, that unwieldy X-factor in art’s globalized theater. Without it, we risk flattening works into aesthetic tokens. Consider Indigenous art: a totem pole’s ochre grooves might dazzle a Parisian gallery-goer as “primitive” elegance, severed from its role as ancestral record, territorial claim, or living ritual object. The violence of decontextualization has become as bad as colonial genocide.

So yes, art bridges cultures, but let’s not mistake that for stability. I picture more of a rope ladder swaying between two sheer-faced cliffs. The view changes depending on who’s climbing, which way they face, and what they’ve been taught to notice. As the tired adage goes, beauty resides in the eye of the beholder. But the cliché holds a kernel of subversion: so does power, history, and the weight of a thousand inherited gazes.  

Museums After Dark

“Cities at night,” wrote Martin Amis in his novel The Information, “[…] contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.” I kept circling back to that line when I came across the phenomenon of museums at night. What do they hold in those after-hours? Artwork that dozes off, perhaps, to gather strength for the coming day’s scrutiny? 

We tend to think of museums in terms of the day, alive with footsteps and eyes. In the stillness of night, the paintings and sculptures seem to shift and breathe, relieved—if only briefly—of the constant human gaze. Yet the silence holds more than just the absence of crowds. It’s a world of diligent, often invisible work, spanning conservation, security, and even fresh interpretations of the art itself.

Conservation, for instance, happens most effectively in the cover of darkness. Specialists, armed with X-rays, infrared imaging, and infinite patience, painstakingly piece together a sculpture’s cracked surface or revive the luster of an old canvas. They work under specialized lighting, focusing on every fleck of paint or hairline fracture. These late-night efforts extend the lives of centuries-old masterpieces so that future generations can also stand awestruck before the same brushstrokes and chisel marks we see today.

All the while, security must remain vigilant. Advanced surveillance systems take the place of daytime docents. Onsite guards walk hushed corridors and motion sensors lie in wait for any unexpected disruption. Temperature controls flicker green and red on monitors, helping not just the art remain more resistant to the erosive damage of passive time.

Museums after dark have begun to spark public curiosity, too. Late-night events— “After Dark” tours, flashlight-guided wanderings—invite visitors to see the exhibits with new and hushed eyes. Shadows swell against the walls, familiar colors shift under subdued lighting, and the eerie quiet imbues every room with a sense of anticipation. Sometimes live music or whispered reading help diminish this unease.

Ultimately, the museum after hours is proof that art never truly sleeps. Even when stripped of its daytime audience, each piece quietly endures—protected, restored, and kept ready for our return. In those hours of watchful calm, it’s almost as if the artwork is taking a long, luxurious breath, poised to astonish us all over again when the doors finally reopen.