So Far So Right

The exhibition “So Far So Right: A Study of Reforms and Transitions,” curated by Fang Yen-Hsiang, was mounted with an open floor plan in a gallery within Taipei’s Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. Visitors could read the text on Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev’s GastARTbeiter (2000–07). The artwork takes its name from the German word gastarbeiter, which means “foreign worker,” and is a vinyl banner that tracks how capital moves across borders. At over five meters across and more than two meters tall, the artwork is packed with dizzying text and diagrams that records how money was moved between nations, institutions and corporations through commissions and sponsorship for the artist, who was acting as a temporary middleman after the Bulgarian Communist Party was toppled.

Another Bulgarian artist, Kosta Tonev, showed The Heavenly Bodies, Once Thrown into a Certain Definite Motion, Always Repeat (2013), whose title references Karl Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation in his foundational treatise Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867). The work included pencil drawings of a manually driven Ottoman-era pleasure wheel prototype, a wheel-less concept car designed by Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, a 100-leva note that circulated for several years in Bulgaria after the fall of the Communist Party and subsequent inflation, and tulip bulbs that reached irrationally high prices after the species obtained a prized tint due to a viral infection. These were all objects that facilitated active capital circulation, as instruments of investment or temporary fiat currency.

Both of these works, along with Croatian artist David Maljković’s 2013 HD video Afterform, which animates cartoons published in a Yugoslavian architecture magazine, recall the dramatic changes in former communist countries in Eastern Europe when they were broken down into smaller nations. Just as Boyadjiev suggests, Maljković’s rhetorical irony indicates that, at the time, individuals were either bearers of the economic currents, or objective witnesses to tectonic, historic changes that were taking place.

One interesting aspect of the exhibition was how artists in Asia—specifically those from Taiwan and Vietnam—created a different landscape, even after taking into account yesteryear’s differences in political and economic systems between Taiwan and Vietnam or Eastern Europe. Several artists provided interpretations of others’ possessions, labor and identities; though they may not have personally experienced the dismantlement of communistic structures, they focus on individual lives that are difficult to observe within the massive systems that contain them, proffering private experiences that transcend boundaries.