Doba Nation

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 akin to live storytelling. Along with her distinctive Vomit Girl motif sculptures, Nguyễn-Long has created a series of cylindrical clay forms which derive their appearance from metal bomb shell casings (post-Vietnam War) that residents of rural Vietnam repurpose for practical and spiritual use. In this new body of work, Nguyễn-Long’s brushwork borrows from the southern Vietnamese folk religious motifs of her father’s birth- place, merged with personalised symbology.

Doba Nation acts to reconcile the artist’s personal experience of diasporic trauma and invites audiences to interrogate the history of their own identity.