Arts, unrelated to objects, cannot be imagined. Arts is the objects themselves, their perceived appearance, or the products of desire towards them. Object became a special issue in early 20th century Europe when works by cubist artists such as Picasso went under the spotlight. Their works were on ‘papiers colles’, ‘tableau objet’ and ‘peinture objet’. However, Marcel Duchamp triggered the full-fledged discourse on object. He blurred the borderline of art by bringing industrial products in ‘readymade’, which placed the object in the center of contemporary art discourse.
These 20th century attempts roots from the crisis of representation, which was considered the defining characteristic of art since the Renaissance. Work on object continued on from surrealist art to Pop art, Neuveau Realism, fluxus, and to Minimalism. Recently, as we can confirm from installations and works on object, it has been continually passed on through the conspicuous state of contemporary art. Also the surrounding discourse has been complicated by the psychoanalytical implications of objects, the debates on the characteristic of plastic art, and the problems of mass consumption society and sociologic and semiotic issues.
Recently, the spread of digital media, development of DNA cloning, appearance of different materials, and other rapid advancements in science and technology is affecting the concept of art. As such the paradigm of art history, museum, art school, and the art market is shifting.
In this respect, to approach the new concept of art, it is important to revisit the subject-object oriented contemporary western thought. As we affirmed through the development of 20th century arts, the relationship between objects discovered through art and the other collective objects is dialectical. As such, it is important to depart from the routinely biased infringement of object and approach the concept of object as a new art, it is crucial to find a new dialectic of objects that fit this day and age.
For non-European countries such as Korea and the rest of East Asia, their concept of object and art history is different. In this regard the dialectic of art and object should be considered in the context of the interaction between European tradition and non-European tradition. East Asia faces limitations when approaching the truth from the Western concept of art. It is worth pointing out that Yanagi Muneyoshi, who was immersed in Western concept of art, tried to overcome its barriers through his encounter of traditional Korean Art and the development of Mingei theory. His Mingei theory and Buddhist art is a case transforming the subject-object based western contemporary art concept into a non-Western tradition of ontological non-dualism(不二論).