Print that Post: On Hồ Chí Minh’s Anti-Colonial Memes

This text was first presented as part of “Tete-a-Tete: Are All Memes Political?” a discussion between Al Hassan Elwan and Cem A. moderated by Stephanie Bailey for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.

In 1922, the revolutionary Vietnamese journalist Nguyễn Ái Quốc published a series of hand-drawn illustrations in Le Paria, an anti-colonial newspaper he founded in Paris that year. Among them was Exposition Coloniale, which satirised the 1922 colonial exhibition in Marseilles, an event styled after the World’s Fair and designed to promote and legitimise France’s colonial standing.

A parody of an exposition map, Nguyễn’s drawing contains damning figures that are described in a numbered key listed below. A set of chains hanging from the “Pavilion Central” are described as “liens de fraternité entre les races” (the bond of brotherhood between races); an Asian man killed by a printing press is titled “liberté de la presse” (freedom of the press); a set of unbalanced scales is named “appareil de justice” (the apparatus of justice); and a cannon is called the “moulin à loyalisme” (the loyalty mill). Meanwhile, the image of an opium pipe and bottle of liquor is described as “produits pour alimenter l'intelligence des indigenes” (products to augment the intelligence of the natives), recalling the weaponisation of narcotics by the British Empire, which used opium as part of its arsenal to forcefully pry open Chinese borders and markets.

Exposition Coloniale was included in the National Gallery Singapore’s 2025 exhibition, City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s, in a fascinating capsule of print objects documenting interventions against the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, alongside works by Vietnamese artists—among them Georges Khan and Vũ Cao Đàm—exhibited in the Indochina Pavilion that year.

Among the publications included was the treatise, “Ne visitez pas l'Exposition Coloniale,” one of two texts the Surrealists produced—here signed, among others, by André Breton and Paul Éluard—against the event. The maladies of colonialism highlighted in that text were the focus of Le Veritable Guide de l'Exposition Coloniale, a guidebook published by the communist relief agency The Secours Rouge International (SRI). Designed to mimic the official Colonial Exposition guide, this alternative exhibition tour unveiled the colonial atrocities which the spectacle masked and was eventually seized by the authorities.¹

Two other illustrations by Nguyễn from 1922 were included in this capsule, like a prologue. The first was Civilisation Supérieure, showing a colonial soldier gleefully holding a flag with the illustration’s title in one hand and a money bag in the other, standing on the backs of an Asian and African, both armed. The second was an untitled depiction of a Chinese rickshaw puller carrying a male European, practically lying flat, shouting, among other things, in French: “Hurry up, you no-name!” Words written on the spokes of the rickshaw’s wheels sum up imperialism’s core processes: “exploitation, civilisation, oppression, association, assimilation, and protection.”

Now, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was an alias. The real artist behind these illustrations was Hồ Chí Minh, founding president of Vietnam and before that, a founding member of the French Communist Party (PCF), which joined forces with the Surrealists to organise La Verité sur les Colonies, a counter-exhibition to the 1931 Colonial Exposition that “articulated the position of the 6th Comintern Congress (1928), that suppressing colonialism was an integral part of overthrowing capitalism.”²

Staged from September 1931 to February 1932 at the Palais des Soviets—the headquarters for workers’ syndicates in Paris—and sponsored by the Anti-Imperialist League, artworks and cultural objects, including music, highlighted the criminality of colonial erasure. One grainy image from the 1933 publication Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution shows a large banner hanging over the scene. A quote by Karl Marx printed in French reads: “A people who oppress others cannot be free.”

Yet when thinking about Hồ Chí Minh’s sharp illustrations published in Le Paria, perhaps the most fascinating of the print items included in City of Others was a series of business-card sized handbills that were distributed and pasted around the 1931 Colonial Exposition by African, French, and Indochinese activists. “Workers from France! Exploited of the colonies! Against your common enemy, French capitalism: ORGANISE AND FIGHT!” reads one text in French. “Colonial profits are dripping with the blood of indigenous populations!” reads another.

The size and shape of these interventions are not unlike that of a classic tweet: a message designed to fit into a limited space, with a designated number of characters: a mirroring that likewise re-frames Hồ Chí Minh’s square-format drawings intended for print circulation, as OG memes. Because what are tweets and memes if not published posts designed to not only express ideas graphically and textually, but also to be reposted? It’s a formal question worth thinking about, as the online space becomes a battleground for anti-imperialist and imperialist movements once again.

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One Work zooms in on a single work or series by an artist to contextualise historical pieces from contemporary perspective, or to illuminate how artists today are redefining printing and paper-based practices.