Mai Nguyễn-Long
Doba Nation
The clusters of ceramic forms and figures that comprise Doba Nation are humorously defiant. Eyes bulge, mouths expel tongues and vomit, tiny Poo Balls are scattered throughout. Positioned on travel crates, repurposed as plinths, there is a sense of things being impermanent, unstable, or on the move. This is a ramshackle chorus of rejected selves, claiming space and community.
Mai Nguyễn-Long first came to ceramics in 2015 during a residency in Vietnam which catalysed a significant shift in her art practice and a personal conciliation of identity. She had previously spent a year in the country in 1994, early in the period of Vietnam’s reopening to the rest of the world. This year was particularly fruitful for Nguyễn-Long, first completing an intensive language course and then studying Vietnamese art history. Immersed in language and culture, she connected to the folkloric and spiritual practices of her father’s extended family in south Vietnam and discovered the rustic wood carvings that feature in village communal halls or đình of northern Vietnam. For the first time, she felt a sense of belonging and connection to the place, people and culture around her. Like Vietnam, Nguyễn-Long’s evolving identity had been fractured by repeated dislocations and cultural exclusions. Born in Tasmania, she grew up in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, later studying in China and Australia. It is not insignificant that each of these places of influence hold the profound trauma of colonisation, not least Vietnam.
Returning to Australia, Nguyễn-Long proudly embraced her Vietnamese-Australian identity but in 1996, after socialising in Vietnamese at a conference on global cultural diversity, she was publicly remonstrated by a respected leader of the diasporic community for her apparent northern ‘communist’ accent. She vowed to never speak Vietnamese again. This aggressive censure was repeated in 2008 when the Casula Powerhouse exhibition I love Pho toured to Western Australia. Decorated with colourful motifs that reflected her lived experiences of political and historical complexities, her Pho Dog created an uproar in the Vietnamese diasporic community that gained national attention. Nguyễn-Long later burned her sculptual artwork of an oversized mongrel dog in a performative act of grief and protest.
Following these traumatic events, a sense of erasure and loss persisted for Nguyễn-Long, and fractured bodies and body parts – both human and dog – began to emerge in her practice. Reflecting her experience of voicelessness, imagery of a girl vomiting proliferated in her drawings, later finding form in clay. Nguyễn-Long’s return to Vietnam in 2015 supported a reconciliation of identity and provided the perfect tactile medium through which to work through layered contexts. By taking an intuitive approach to working with clay, unconscious urgings are made manifest in a collaborative process of transformation. Nguyễn-Long says that “the multifunctional aspects of my ‘Vomit Girl’ character and her invented iterations, such as Ewme (Goddess of the Enemies Who Made Me), have given me a creative strategy to embrace the brokenness around me and see myself within that broader context of community and societal brokenness. Historical violence. We are broken together. We are all flawed and have blindspots, we all have the potential to be victims and perpetrators. The transformative characteristics of clay help me process this”. ¹
Central to Nguyễn-Long’s ceramic objects are cylindrical forms inspired by post-Vietnam War metal bomb shell casings that some residents of rural Vietnam have repurposed for practical and spiritual use. Nguyễn-Long encountered these large objects on two separate occasions, hanging outside đình as village bells: hence the derivation of the exhibition title of Doba, a neology of đình-bombshell-bell-axis. Other remnant post-war hardware has also found its way into Nguyễn-Long’s work – a seismic intrusion detector became a five-pointed hat, while the striking orange of her Vomit Girl figures allude to the notorious use of the defoliant Agent Orange by US forces. The artist’s subversive use of language and motif pokes at the complexity of lived experience under and post colonisation, as well as the legacy of trauma that can stifle open debate.
A number of Nguyễn-Long’s characteristic Vomit Girl works feature in Doba Nation and these figures seem to be evolving into increasingly complex, rhythmic forms with holes, prongs and looping appendages jostling over the surface. The only glazed objects in the exhibition, these jarring creatures demand our attention: bright orange with staring white eyes, they stand boldly above the crowd of smaller objects. Other slip painted forms appear to be in the process of transformation or disintegration. Tubular Doba shapes reach out, holes searching like blind mouths or nostrils. At times complete faces are represented; their serene expressions (albeit on stumpy, mutating shapes) are a far cry from their Vomit Girl cousins. In others, unblinking eyes stare, alien faces emerging from the carved and painted surfaces. There is a clear evolution here that suggests an eventual reunification of lost parts. This transformative aspect underpins a provocative complexity to Nguyễn-Long’s work that is deeply compelling.
Like the playful language of Nguyễn-Long’s artworks, the title of this exhibition plays with multiple readings and contexts. ‘Nation’ points to territories and demarcations – the bloody lines of colonisation and the exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism. We could break down the wordplay to ‘Dob-a nation’ as a nod to the hypocritical finger-pointing around human rights abuses by various governments, domestic and international. Alternatively, I am heartened by the sense of nation-building within this exhibition as these strange members band together, comfortable with their brokenness. This troupe of characters performs a radical act of self-acceptance in which the opinions of others are irrelevant.
¹ Email correspondence with the artist, 2024
This publication supports the exhibition Mai Nguyễn-Long: Doba Nation
7 February – 17 April 2025 Text copyright ©Lia McKnight, 2024.
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JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
Left and above right: Mai Nguyễn-Long, Doba Nation (details), 2024. Images courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin.
Front: Mai Nguyễn-Long, The Vomit Girl Project: Vigit-Worana-Doba 2017-2022, TAEM Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin. Photo by Silversalt.
Lia McKnight Curator, John Curtin Gallery