Created for Perth Festival 2025, Mai Nguyễn-Long's large-scale installation Doba Nation features hand-formed clay sculptures that are arranged by the artist on site in a process that is like live storytelling.
Opening Event: 6 February 2025
Exhibition Open: 7 February – 17 April 2025
Supported By: Perth Festival.
Created for Perth Festival 2025, this large-scale installation features hand-formed ceramic sculptures that are arranged by the artist on site, in a process akin to live storytelling. Doba Nation acts to reconcile the artist’s personal experience of diasporic trauma and invites audiences to interrogate the history of their own identity.
Doba Nation is populated by three of Nguyễn-Long’s distinctive Vomit Girl sculptures, forms which first emerged as a way to address the artist’s sense of voicelessness, and personal and cultural erasure. These are accompanied by painted cylindrical ceramic forms which the artist calls Doba. Nguyễn-Long’s clay Doba derive their appearance from metal bomb shell casings (post Vietnam War) that some residents of rural Vietnam have repurposed for practical and spiritual use. In this new body of work, Nguyễn-Long pays particular attention to brushwork illustration on the surfaces of her ceramic objects as a strategy to amplify distortions within particular diasporic narratives. These markings borrow from the southern Vietnamese folk religious motifs of her father’s birth-place, merged with personalised symbology. Drawing from early matriarchal and animist knowledge systems, the installation is tied together visually by scatterings of small organic shapes, subtly alluding to humanity’s earthy interconnectedness.
Mai Nguyễn-Long is an artist, academic and storyteller whose transient upbringing informs the tapestry of narratives that live through her work. Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father and a 4th generation Australian mother of Irish-Samoan descent, Nguyễn-Long’s formative years were spent living in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.
Nguyễn-Long’s early academic commitments included Asian Studies, Art History, and Museum Studies. These experiences led to her work with an international health organization, becoming a 1999 Australian Youth Ambassador for Development with the Ministry of Health in Fiji. Since 1996 Mai has exhibited across a range of mediums including painting, drawing, media, mixed media sculptures and installation.
As an adult, Nguyễn-Long lived in Australia and China, however, it was her pilgrimage to Vietnam that has had the most profound influence on the aesthetic and theoretical direction of her art. In 2015 a Copyright Agency Cultural Fund residency in the Hanoi ceramics village of Bat Trang introduced Mai to clay. In 2023 she completed a practice-based doctoral program with her PhD thesis titled Vomit Girl Beyond Diasporic Trauma: Interconnecting Contemporary Art and Folkloric Practices in Vietnam at the University of Wollongong. Mai now lives and works in Dharawal country, Bulli, and returns to Vietnam as often as possible.
Header Image: Mai Nguyễn-Long, The Vomit Girl Project: Vigit-Worana-Doba (detail), 2017-2022, 9 x 3.2 m. Photo by Silversalt, courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin.
