It is not by chance that Edival Ramosa’s New Totemic Construction sketch was made during a time of intense debate within the arts about what was considered “constructive” in Brazil and abroad. But Ramosa, with his proposition for a “new totemic construction,” was not trying to join that white lineage of geometric abstraction; he was rather thinking about the racial complexity of abstraction and how race’s structural relations could be expressed in a structurally ascendent—totemic—way.

For Choi, time becomes fused and stuck around trauma. To experience profound grief is to be taken out of the flow of time, yet “temporal magic” is what allows for an escape from the inexorable and crushing movement of history: grief as resistance and resistance as grief. There are very good reasons to lose one’s narratives, both as individuals and as nations. One of the goals of experimental writing like Choi’s is to disrupt official narratives, histories, and images along with, more importantly, their meanings—although they’re more like presumptions and predispositions—because narrative is a prime vehicle in which to smoothly embed them.

If post-socialist critique is reductive, individual artists and curators are not the sole culprits—nor are MoMA, Guggenheim, or liberal cultural institutions. The Communist Party of Vietnam has itself perpetuated a corrupt version of its own history, erasing vibrant internal debates and silencing opposition to state communism, whether from within a Marxist framework or against it. Post-socialist art vividly reflects the strange mutations undergone by the current Party, which has drastically departed from, yet still rides on, its communist identity. It remains important to inquire, at each instance, whether the appropriation of state-socialist aesthetics illuminates the present’s relationship with the past or obfuscates it further.