Mai Nguyễn-Long’s large-scale installation Doba Nation features hand-formed clay sculptures arranged by the artist on site in a process akin to live storytelling.
Created for Perth Festival 2025, the exhibition acts to reconcile the artist’s personal experience of diasporic trauma and invites audiences to interrogate the history of their own identity. It is populated by three of Nguyễn-Long’s distinctive Vomit Girl sculptures, forms that first emerged as a way to address the artist’s sense of voicelessness, and personal and cultural erasure; painted cylindrical ceramic forms the artist calls Doba accompany.
Mai Nguyễn-Long, Doba (double mouth), 2023, clay. Photograph: Bernie Fischer. Courtesy the artist, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin and John Curtin Gallery, Western Australia
John Curtin Gallery
7 February to 17 April 2025
Western Australia
