Fictions in the Fold: Found Images and Critical Fabulation in Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn's Moving-Image Practice

Abstract How might fabulation be a critical tool to use when working with orphaned, found, or inherited images? How might it then become a reflection on the parameters of history, narrative, and fiction? This article analyzes Sài Gòn-based artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn's short film Looking for Lost Captions; or, How I Found Ancestral Solidarity in Cyberspace to argue that Nguyễn contextualizes found images by creating “fictions in the fold.” With particular attention given to how he uses digital media to appropriate the still image by way of multisensorial movement, historical parallels, and critical fabulation, the article contends that Nguyễn advances an Afro Asian aesthetic by ultimately tracing multiple fictions that fold seemingly impossible realities within how we narrate global and world history.