The art concept plays an essential part in the creation of contemporary art. In order to capture the progress of the formation process of an art concept, we conducted a case study of a contemporary artist. We interviewed a professional artist about his creation process once every three weeks for about ten months. This report focuses on an early phase of the search for ideas, in which he took many photographs to collect visual information to form the core part of the art concept. Using both the photographs he took and the interview data collected during this phase, we identify when and how features of his art concept emerged. The results show that his art concept was formed through cycles of two types of search for visual information: an active, explorative search to find the unexpected, and more a focused search to interpret it.