Afro-Asia Intimacies: A Speculative Storytelling Aesthetic in Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s Moving Image of the Postcolonial Space

Paper Abstract: Attending to video installation as an art form, this paper engages two works by the Vietnamese artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn (The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019 and Because No One Living Will Listen, 2022), interweaving formal analyses, a post/decolonial reading of the Afro-Asia intimacies undergirding the lives of the film’s subjects, and a reimagining of the postcolonial space through Nguyễn’s speculative storytelling aesthetic. Bookended by the two continents, Africa and Asia, the first installation film follows three stories imagined and fabulated by Vietnamese-Senegalese in Africa, while the second attempts to write an impossible letter to the dead at the Moroccan gate in Vietnam—a historical site and sign of solidarity by the defected Moroccan soldiers towards the Vietnamese liberation. Instead of surrendering to an anticipated story of solidarity, the two films juxtapose the tension between everyday generational quarrels, unanswered questions, fragmentality, and absence on one side and an unspoken, embodied reciprocal recognition of being unhomely together on the other. Nguyễn’s installation of the moving image and his commitment to the speculative, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s words, “refigures [the past] as a contingent in-between space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present [which] becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.” The paper shows how the South-South axis of intimacies expresses itself through the speculative and requires a certain kind of spatio-temporal reorientation of the current state of postcolonial and decolonial theories.