In March 2025, members of the C-MAP Southeast and East Asia Group visited Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi. In Vietnam, we met the curator Van Do, who served as one of our interlocutors, joining us on visits to museums, galleries, and studios. Her essay “Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human” stems from this engagement.

With red scarves knotted at our necks, we gather in rows every Monday morning before class for the weekly flag-raising ritual. Beneath the national flag, members of the ceremonial team, dressed in red-and-white uniforms and wearing hats shaped like bamboo shoots perched on their heads, beat drums and crash cymbals fiercely, as we sing along to the national anthem. At its close, we respond in unison: “For the socialist homeland, for the great ideal of Uncle Hồ: Ready!” In every classroom, the Five Teachings of Uncle Hồ hang neatly beside the blackboard (usually on the right side): “Love your Fatherland, love the people. Study well, work well. Unite well, discipline well. Keep good hygiene. Be honest, brave, and modest.” After school, following the instructions of Uncle Hồ, we rally quickly in the schoolyard for collective physical exercise. Outside the classrooms, storytelling contests about Uncle Hồ, revolutionary heroes, or moral lessons; theatrical reenactments of historical events; and the collection of scrap materials for “small plan campaigns” to raise funds for the school and instill environmentally conscious habits become endearing rituals of discipline in camaraderie.

More than simply school routine, such rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human”¹, laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Beyond our formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into our leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. I spent the summer of 2004, when I was nine, at the Children’s Palace learning to read music and how to play the organ. Ten years later, in 2024, I revisited these childhood memories when alongside Le Thuan Uyen and Pham Minh Hieu, I approached the Palace as curator of Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the Future.² Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.³ 

Mass singing and choral performances, often of revolutionary or patriotic songs—especially those expressing love for “Uncle” Hồ Chí Minh—once filled the music classrooms of the Children’s Palace. I can still hum and recall the dance steps to “Last Night I Dreamed of Uncle Hồ” and sing along to “Who Loves Uncle Hồ Chí Minh More than Teenagers and Children?” Written by composer Phong Nhã after his visit to the Palace in 1945, the latter song encapsulates a moment of nation-building, one coinciding with Vietnam’s declaration of independence from French colonial rule and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The layered history of the Hanoi Children’s Palace can be traced back to the 1930s, when the site first served as a kindergarten during the French colonial era. Later, in 1946, it was taken over by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and transformed into the headquarters of the Young Pioneer Organization—a central institution during the resistance against French colonialism for mobilizing children, adolescents and young adults, and for organizing cultural activities. Under different names and in varied form, this political mission continued throughout the anti-American war until national reunification following the Geneva Agreements in 1954.

In 1974, with support from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the spirit of Soviet-bloc solidarity, the original French structure was converted into a six-story complex featuring signature perforated concrete sunshades and the Red Scarf Theatre. The building was designed by architect Lê Văn Lân (born 1938), a graduate of the first Architecture and Construction cohort of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (fig. 1). Lê Văn Lân’s career spanned leadership positions in urban-planning agencies, a residency in Moscow focused on urban planning (1961), and advanced training in the German Democratic Republic in cultural architecture (1968–72).

Lê Văn Lân’s trajectory situated him within transnational socialist architectural discourse, in which rational urban planning, collectivist functions, and the civic role of public institutions were intertwined. The Hanoi Children’s Palace was therefore not a singular project but rather part of a broader network of cultural-educational infrastructures dedicated to shaping the socialist subject. The architect’s immersion in Eastern bloc urbanism and institutional design likely reinforced his conviction in architecture’s formative power—to spatialize ideology, discipline the senses, and stage a future-oriented collectivity—as a means to help build a new socialist country and contribute to the renewal of a nation devastated by war.

The name “Hanoi Children’s Palace” was adopted in 1985; prior to that, the institution was known as the Children’s Cultural House (1975–85) and the Children’s Club (before 1975). This renaming in the 1980s was likely intended to align with the nomenclature used across socialist nations, while also asserting the ideological role of the institution. The very concept of a “children’s palace” originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–30s with the Palaces of the Young Pioneers (Дворец пионеров)—extracurricular centers where children engaged in sports, arts, science, and ideological education. 

From the 1950s onward, this model spread throughout the socialist world—in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and allied countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, children’s palaces and youth cultural houses became urban landmarks and emblems of socialist modernity. In China, they proliferated from the 1950s under Maoist ideology, with many still operating today. North Korea monumentalized the model with the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang (built in 1989). In Cuba, the Ernesto Che Guevara Children’s Palace (Palacio de Pioneros Ernesto Che Guevara) opened in 1979 as a large-scale extracurricular center combining ideological education, vocational training, and cultural, technical, and athletic programs for young students.

In Hanoi, three major institutions—the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the Youth Cultural Centre, and the Hanoi Children’s Palace—remain architectural traces of a socialist ambition to cultivate the citizens of the future, each corresponding to a different stage of subject formation: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and the working masses. The architecture of these institutions localized socialist aesthetics through modernist planning, multifunctional public spaces, and symbolic ornamentation. In Vietnam, Hanoi Children’s Palace continues to operate under the administration of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union. Established following the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930, the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union was formalized in 1931 as a socio-political organization responsible for youth education, mobilization, and cadre formation. Operating under Party leadership, the Union functions as a key intermediary between the state and young people, combining political training with cultural, artistic, and social activities.

Despite their continued operation, the civic-educational functions of these institutions have significantly eroded; these spaces have increasingly shifted toward ideologically neutral cultural-commercial programming. Under the pressures of neoliberal marketization, the architecture of collective dreams—once overflowing with optimism for a socialist future—has deteriorated. It now not only competes with an expanding landscape of private arts, sports, and educational facilities, but also is facing the risk of appropriation if not outright demolition.

For generations of children who came of age after the war, me included, the Hanoi Children’s Palace endures as a tender repository of childhood memory. On my first site visit to the Palace, which coincided with its 69th anniversary, observed under the title Bầy chim về tổ (A Flock of Birds Returning to Its Nest), a group of Palace alumni—now in their sixties and seventies—performed on the stage of the Red Scarf Theatre. They sang the same songs they had performed in their youth. Beneath airy corridors and patterned concrete sunshades shimmering in the sunlight, childhood was celebrated through collective play, reverie, performances, and long, exhilarating hours of creative learning.

Held from November 9–17, 2024, Nostalgia for the Future was a curatorial project that unfolded within the three buildings that make up the Hanoi Children’s Palace: Ấu Trĩ Viên (or Childhood Institute), the six-story classroom building, and the Red Scarf Theatre, expanding into an exhibition that spanned indoor and outdoor spaces, public programs, and playgrounds. In this essay, I focus on Nguyễn Trần Nam (born 1979)’s “We Never Fall” (2010), Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên (born 1993)’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” (2024), and Nguyễn Huy An (born 1982)’s Vowels series (2014–24) to examine how each of these works entangles socialist memory with the political role of pedagogy, while probing the possibilities of art to intervene in and reinterpret an ideological pedagogical project that has long receded. Here, “nostalgia” is not sentimental longing; instead, it names a stance that acknowledges the discipline, violence, and psychic residues of socialist education, along with its broader politico-ideological ambition to forge the “new socialist human,” and the ways in which this past continues to inscribe itself in the present. By reintroducing and recontextualizing contemporary artworks within a site once instrumentalized for political pedagogy, the curatorial gesture confronts and reshapes socialist legacies, enabling the Children’s Palace to assume a new role (albeit for only nine fleeting days) as a space for artistic and curatorial intervention—as an attempt to write into its history before the uncertain future overtakes it.

The Red Scarf Theatre—a 500-seat auditorium with recessed, starlike ceiling lights that sits on the right side of the classroom building—once hosted hundreds of thousands of performances, from ballets and dramatic productions to music competitions for children across the country. It now became the stage for Nguyễn Trần Nam’s “We Never Fall” (fig. 2). Five life-size composite sculptures resembling Russian balance dolls stood silently in the dim hall. The work drew on the lật đật (balance doll or Nevalyashka (Неваляшка) which means “one that never falls”). The lật đật was a familiar imported toy that was brought to Vietnam in the 1960s–80s through Soviet and Eastern European aid and trade. It circulated among generations of children and students studying abroad at the time.

Each of the dolls, modeled after the artist’s family members, represents a role within socialist Vietnam: the peasant, the teacher, the worker, the student, and the artist—a symbolic taxonomy of laboring, disciplinary, and creative bodies mobilized to visualize the socialist “collective subject.” Installed within the Red Scarf Theatre, the work took on a fictive dramaturgy: four dolls occupied the position of the former orchestra pit, facing an empty audience, as one doll—the student wearing a red scarf—waited in the wings.

The roly-poly mechanism—righting itself each time it is pushed over—embodied resilience and stability, yet this very capacity to endure revealed its paradox: an endless return that hardens into rigidity, a self-operating system that survives by refusing transformation. Are we the ones doing the pushing, or have we already been absorbed into a programmed movement? Are we watching them perform their choreographed gestures, are they watching us in return? The scene unfolded as a meditation on socialist pedagogy—on discipline, observation, and the suspension of action—in which resilience becomes indistinguishable from resistance to change, and a collective is trained to watch, to wait, and to return, again and again, to its predetermined place.

Behind the wings of the Red Scarf Theatre, another “stage” was concealed within a former dressing room, where Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” quietly asserted a commanding presence (fig. 3).⁴ The work took the form of a monumental sculpture: a basin of Hồng Hà violet ink—shaped like the traditional lectern found in public school classrooms across Vietnam—paired with a set of distorted stainless-steel fountain pens poised above but not touching the liquid surface. For generations of students in Northern Vietnam, Hồng Hà violet was the compulsory ink used in grades one through six; children were taught to write only with the right hand and to follow the Latin alphabet. At the Children’s Palace, as in schools nationwide, “penmanship contests”—in which award-winning handwriting featured immaculate proportions, precisely measured letter spacing, balanced strokes of thin and thick lines, a calibrated tilt, and rhythmically connected curves—reflected prolonged disciplinary training. Discipline here was not simply correct posture or repetitive practice—it also came with punishment. How many generations remember the sharp crack of a wooden ruler across the palm for messy writing, wrong stroke order, left-handedness, or the failure to memorize a lesson?

In socialist pedagogy, discipline and punishment “naturalized” violence through repetition, surveillance, and self-control, echoing the proverb that frames strictness as affection: Thương cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi (roughly, “Those who love discipline with the rod and the whip; those who hate offer sweetness and indulgence”). Such a saying becomes an alibi for coercion. In Thuỷ Tiên’s work, this history has been materialized as bodily, edging toward exhaustion—hovering between physical and psychological fatigue. The word “eyelid” (mi mắt) in the title becomes an extended metaphor—a thin, trembling threshold between alertness and rest, discipline and collapse.

A trio of works by Nguyễn Huy An, produced over the span of a decade—“A à ” (2014), “Musical Notes” (2023), and “Music Notations” (2024)—was installed across two locations within the Children’s Palace: the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room (where Hồ Chí Minh signed the Preliminary Agreement with the French on March 6, 1946) and the drum-and-trumpet rehearsal room of the former Ấu Trĩ Viên, where the Young Bamboo Shoot ceremonial team still practices weekly. As with many of Huy An’s projects, this constellation of works operates simultaneously as performance and conceptual installation. Though produced ten years apart, they resonate as variations on a shared impulse: dismantling the visual and sonic architectures of socialist propaganda and returning them to their raw, pre-ideological forms.

In “A Ă Â,” the artist extracted all 29 letters of the Vietnamese alphabet and five Vietnamese tone marks from faded or partially destroyed propaganda slogans painted on the walls of cultural houses across Northern provinces outside of Hanoi (fig. 4). Painstakingly isolating each character, Huy An reframed them individually, stripping them back to a neutral, emptied state, prior to reassembling them into words, meaning, and ideology. Made of layered lime paint, these slogans accumulate over time: new ones are painted over old, then crack, chip, and erode, leaving overlapping fragments of what once lay beneath. Some letters remain decipherable; others are broken, orphaned, or illegible, severed from any coherent phrase. For the Children’s Palace, Huy An retained only the 12 vowels (A, Ă, Â, E, Ê, I, O, Ô, Ơ, U, Ư, Y) and five Vietnamese tone marks, placing them high up against an aged wall like remnants of a bygone propagandistic past.

In Huy An’s live performance as part of “4th Quarter Report” (Á Space, 2023), in which the work “Musical Notes” first appeared, the artist carried a bundle of bronze bars as he walked out before the audience.⁵ He slowly scattered the bars across the floor while reciting a poem that begins, “In two-four time and the marching rhythm / March to Hanoi – March to Saigon / I count” (fig. 5). He then proceeded to count aloud the 255 musical notes that make up two songs, both of which are often broadcast as “victory anthems” through public loudspeakers on national commemorative days: “Tiến về Sài Gòn” (“March to Saigon”) by Huỳnh Minh Siêng, is played on April 30 in honor of the reunification of South Vietnam, and “Tiến về Hà Nội” (“March to Hanoi”) by Văn Cao, is played on October 10 to mark the liberation of the capital from French colonial rule. Once considered triumphant, celebratory, and bound to historic moments of liberation, these songs—repeated year after year until their glory erodes—are, here, stripped of narrative and affect, in effect reduced to abstract sonic objects.

After counting, Huy An concluded: “The sum of two marches / plus nine single rests, / amounts to 255 tones.” The 255 notes are thus reduced to a simple numerical sequence, then translated into bronze bars capable of producing sound. At the end of the performance, the artist struck the bar corresponding to the note G (sol). Exhibited later as a museological artifact in the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room—surrounded by archival photographs and documents—the bronze bars lie neatly on a long table draped in dark green velvet, assuming a solemn presence that confronts the persistence of ideology as it is ritualized into everyday life (figs. 6, 7).

In “Musical Notations,” public monuments across Hanoi have been transformed into musical instruments: the Martyrs’ Monument in Vạn Xuân Park (Quán Thánh district), the Martyrs’ Monument in Bà Kiệu Temple Square, the Martyrs’ Monument in the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the statue of King Lý Thái Tổ, the statue of painter Victor Tardieu at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, monuments to Alexandre Yersin and José Martí Péréz, the Lenin Monument in Lenin Park, monuments to Nguyễn Trãi and Emperor Quang Trung, the statue of Saint Paul at Xanh Pôn Hospital, and the Nguyễn Văn Trỗi monument at West Lake, among others. By striking each monument with a hammer and recording their resonant echoes, Huy An produced a series of “notations” that collapses symbolic hierarchies: socialist heroes, ancient kings, foreign intellectuals, and anticolonial figures are all reduced to the acoustic materiality of hammered stone and metal—later transcribed into onomatopoeic words. Monuments to martyrs, emperors, and revolutionaries are symbolically leveled, leaving behind nothing but the sound of matter.

Across the three works in Huy An’s “Vowels” series, a process of deconstruction has transpired: letters, musical notes, and monuments have each been returned to elemental form. In their transition, the works invite us to consider how political symbols might be released from ideological function and returned to the realm of pure sensory encounter, open to potential poetic reassembly beneath a sky that seems anything but new.

Rather than treating the Hanoi Children’s Palace as a neutral site for artistic display, Nostalgia for the Future engaged it as a historical apparatus—a space designed to enact socialism as a performative project, in which the “new socialist human” is not merely imagined but continuously produced through education, discipline, collective ritual, and bodily training. Within this context, nostalgia is not about singing the same old songs or indulging in sentimental recollections of the past. Instead, it operates as a critical stance—one that acknowledges both the emancipatory promises and the disciplinary violence embedded in socialist pedagogy as well as interrogates how socialist ideals were rehearsed, normalized, and internalized through everyday bodily practices.

The works discussed here do not simply reference this legacy; they position themselves in relation to it, testing what remains operative, what has failed, and what continues to structure subjectivity in the present. While reactivating pedagogical residues and recalling lived histories, the project orchestrated nostalgia as a critical field of strategies through which artists perform, rehearse, distort, or refuse inherited pedagogical forms and socialist values. Nguyễn Trần Nam draws on his own familial memories to question socialist ambition by unsettling its symbols through intimate and playful engagement. Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên, by contrast, approaches nostalgia as an embodied and affective residue, foregrounding how socialist education persists not only as ideology but also as somatic memory—in posture, endurance, sensation, and affect. For Nguyễn Huy An, nostalgia takes the form of a quiet, destructive poetics, a subtractive process in which structures and symbols are gradually eroded and rendered fragile, opening them to semantic and sonic reconfiguration.

At the center of the Children’s Palace complex lies an open courtyard that once functioned as a space for collective activity and play. Here, gym classes and group exercise took place, parents and grandparents waited to collect their children, and brass bands rehearsed their repertoire (fig. 8, 9). Under the pressures of urban densification, the courtyard has since been repurposed as a ticketed parking lot. For the project, a playground was reintroduced into this space. Modeled after Điềm Phùng Thị’s modular sign system and designed by Think Playgrounds, it included slides, swings, and climbing structures.⁶ The playground temporarily reclaimed the courtyard and returned it to its intended subject—children—while simultaneously calling into question the site’s future capacity for play, reverie, and cultural enrichment amid its ideological defunctionalizing and the rise of market-driven, privatized educational infrastructures.

Together, these positions formed not a consensus but rather a spectrum of interventions across which socialist legacies are variously negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured in the present. In drawing these tensions into the present, the project proposed nostalgia not as reconciliation or closure, but instead as ongoing negotiation with the political and affective residues of socialist ambition.

With special thanks to Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Minh Nguyen for their editorial input. 

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