After completing my research on minimalism, I fell into deep contemplation. Research on minimalism has already been extensively conducted by many scholars, and I felt that both what I could say and what I wanted to say were neither precise nor compelling. While discussing this dilemma with a friend, he mentioned Nicolas Bourriaud, who served as the artistic director of last year’s Gwangju Biennale and who had proposed the concept of relational aesthetics in the 1990s. I became interested in this idea, and instead of focusing further on sampling, I decided to explore relational aesthetics more deeply.

Before diving into detailed research, here are some initial thoughts I had. Relational aesthetics suggests that contemporary artists tend to create artworks centered on relationships. That is, the subject of art is displaced onto the audience, or the audience itself becomes part of the artwork, or, on a broader level, social and political relationships are treated as the core material of the artwork. Thus, relational aesthetics can be seen as discussing the material of art, but at the same time, it speaks to a shift in the subject of art.

My major was classical composition, and through my recent research into minimalism, particularly the early minimalist music trends of the 1960s, I also gained a clearer understanding of how the subject of art has evolved over time. In the Classical era, composers stood as strong subjects of art. To convey their works to performers—who were often seen merely as reproducers or replicators—and to preserve their compositions, they developed the system of musical notation. From the development of notation, tensions began to arise over who truly holds authorship or subjectivity in art. As Romanticism emerged, the performer’s subjectivity grew stronger, and the subject of art came to include not only the composer but also the performer.

This structure began to change in the 1950s, notably with the Fluxus movement. Artists started to incorporate chance and indeterminacy into music, placing emphasis on the audience and the environment. From this, the displacement of artistic subjectivity onto the audience truly began. Nicolas Bourriaud argues that today, relationality and interactive art have become dominant trends in contemporary artistic practice.

I plan to research this topic further and write an essay based on my findings. In addition, I intend to include an evaluation of the Gwangju Biennale curated by Bourriaud at the end of my paper.