Mai Nguyen-Long Doba Nation | Perth Festival Exhibition

Created for Perth Festival 2025, Mai Nguyen-Long's installation Doba Nation features hand-formed clay sculptures that are arranged by the artist on site in a process that is 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 Nguyen-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. Nguyen-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, Nguyen-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.