Mai Nguyen-Long: Sydney Contemporary 2024

At Sydney Contemporary 2024, Mai Nguyễn-Long will present The Vomit Girl Project at Installation Contemporary, curated by Talia Linz.

Positioned at the entrance to the fair, the kaleidoscopic display collides inspiration from cultural artefacts and personal family history to represent diasporic narratives. The work encompasses a selection of clay characters inspired by đình wood carvings and a Vietnamese rural aesthetic known as mộc mạc. Mộc mạc is generally translated as rough, rustic or even uncouth. To the artist, however, it is an earthy aesthetic guided by practical principles of survival, providing a primordial link to Indigenous Vietnamese nature-spirit consciousness and mother goddess practices in Vietnam.

Nguyễn-Long’s The Vomit Girl Project is a way for the artist to unpack her conflicted relationship with her Vietnamese heritage and is connected to notions of resistance, belonging and self-determination. Fluid associations and playful and unorthodox expressions of Buddhism inform her clay-building method. These figures and vessels are occasionally marked with broken chopsticks, extracted human teeth and porcupine quill. Nguyễn-Long’s vomit motif becomes an ambiguous and tongue-like form, representing one’s mother tongue, as well as those who have lost their mother tongue.

This major presentation precedes the artist’s participation in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial at QAGOMA, which opens later this year.

To enquire about the sculptural works comprising The Vomit Girl Project by Mai Nguyễn-Long, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au