Ngoc Nau, Virtual Reverie: Echoes of a Forgotten Utopia, 2023

Can a monument make a myth of a man? During her 2023 residency at Rupert in Vilnius, multimedia artist Ngoc Nau became intrigued by the Lithuanian capital’s Soviet-era public architecture and oral histories of socialist icons, among them the city’s Lenin statue—originally erected at Lukiškės Square and removed in 1991 as a symbol of Lithuanian independence from the USSR. Out of Nau’s research into ideological structures that link Vilnius and Hanoi—her city of residence—emerged the video work Virtual Reverie: Echoes of a Forgotten Utopia, 2023, an experimental mash-up of sci-fi world-building and hip-hop mantra. Against a backdrop of surreal landscapes cobbled from 3D-animated fragments of the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Palace of Culture and Labor, a group of youths traverse multiple realms to unearth stories of Lenin statues, including one’s toppling in Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests of 2013 and 2014, and another’s enduring presence in Hanoi at a public park. As Nau’s characters hop and dance among simulated debris, violent protests, and quotidian happenings, they not only reexamine the ideological ebbs and flows of socialist-influenced countries, but also convey their desire to imagine a new future, hopeful and unencumbered by past shadows.

Virtual Reverie: Echoes of a Forgotten Utopia was recently shown at “Hypnotising Chickens: Recent Video Art from Vietnam and Tasmania,”Contemporary Art Tasmania, from March 13–29, 2025.

-Hung Duong