In the research phase of Unit 3, I often reflected on the relationship among artists, artworks, and audiences. First, I believe that the fundamental role of an artwork is to serve as a bridge between the artist and the audience. Through the artwork, the audience receives the ideas the artist conveys, processes them into personal thoughts, and is led to reflection—this is the foundational meaning of art. Regardless of the form, every artist's ultimate goal in creating art is to achieve this. However, Yoko Ono's work revealed new possibilities in how art can transmit messages.

Typically, traditional artworks convey the artist’s ideas through visual, auditory, and tactile senses, as seen in painting, sculpture, and multimedia installation art. Yoko Ono’s Instruction Art, a new form composed of directive short text, broke away from this framework. She uses actions derived from written instructions as a means to convey information to the audience, which was eye-opening for me.

“Instruction Art” is a form of conceptual art without any tangible object. Ono herself describes it as a “painting composed in the mind,” making it a pioneering form of conceptual art. The instructions for these artistic acts free the work from the limitations of physical performance, bearing a resemblance to Chinese haiku or Zen koans.

Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (1964) begins with the line, “Burn this book after you have read it,” while John Lennon’s endorsement on the last page reads, “This is the greatest book I’ve ever burned.” This form of Instruction Art has been a constant throughout Ono’s subsequent works.

In a 1972 interview, Yoko Ono quoted Marshall McLuhan’s theory, “The medium is the message,” saying, “We each have our own message. These messages themselves are the medium.” Art should not be seen as a privilege but rather freed to become something accessible to all—a foresight that resonates with Andy Warhol’s famous statement, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

In today’s fast-paced information age, there are now countless forms through which art can be transmitted, as there are numerous mediums that can carry messages. Whether through TikTok or Instagram, each of us interacts daily with a vast amount of information, constantly receiving, processing, and sharing it on these platforms. A key question for us as a new generation of artists is how to make valuable use of these information mediums.