by Sam Beard.

One of the great failings of Dispatch Review is the lack of coverage that has been afforded to John Curtin Gallery over the last couple of years. Several major exhibitions have slipped by, including the likes of proppaNOW’s major exhibition Occurrent Affair, Susan Flavell’s Horn of the Moon – 13 Goddesses, IOTA24 Codes in Parallel, the Brett Whiteley: Inside the Studio exhibition, Aziz Hazara’s Bow Echo, and the particularly uneven, though still notable, Regional Arts Triennial: Open Borders. While the past two years have included some significant shows, one recurring theme has been a less-than-critical approach to regional arts—a topic the Gallery has seemed to champion, but through survey shows that ultimately are more like visual art buffets than coherent examinations of a subject.
        This year’s Perth Festival offerings from John Curtin Gallery (JCG) are two solo exhibitions, both concentrating on focused bodies of works—Alice Guiness’s Burndud Ground and Mai Nguyễn-Long’s Doba Nation. The text that accompanies Nguyễn-Long’s work positions it as culminating from the artist’s explorations into family history and cultural identity. Nguyễn-Long considers her Vietnamese, Australian and Irish-Samoan heritage as vital to her creative work, along with periods spent living and traveling in China and Vietnam. In the cavernous dark gallery, Nguyễn-Long’s clay sculptures are bunched together on three travel crate-cum-plinths and the floor. Low to the ground and in the void of a darkened gallery, the figures and forms become diminutive, almost shrinking before you. This was the first peculiar choice for the exhibition. Images of other installations of Nguyễn-Long’s work seem to favour their scale, such as the display at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, currently at QAGOMA; in this larger installation, the clay sculptures are raised off the ground to about waist height. It is a display that appears more intimate and striking—given the bright lighting that reveals more of the earth tones and brilliant oranges of the sculptures—than the JCG display.
        JCG curator Lia McKnight describes the assortment of clay figures and forms as “humorously defiant” in the exhibition brochure. While an apt description, and true to the works’ affective qualities, what seems disjointed or in deep contrast is the introductory information in the gallery, which asserts that these humorous, or “deskilled”, sculptures are deeply connected to cultural and individual trauma. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with the idea of using humour as a disarming or subversive way of communicating ideas about trauma—but instead that the proposed subject and the interpreted subject (or, put differently, the objects themselves) appear at odds. Reading up on Nguyễn-Long’s work, it is through subtleties that one is meant to deduce these linkages between the sculptures and specific aspects of history and trauma. For example, it is said that the use of bright orange is to allude to the highly toxic herbicide Agent Orange that U.S. forces used to defoliate landscapes during the Vietnam War. On paper, the reference rings true. However, visually, in the gallery, the chance of coming to such a conclusion is tenuous.
        It was during her trip through Vietnam that Nguyễn-Long spent time marveling at the rustic wood carvings that adorn the đình (communal halls) of northern Vietnam. Another influence on Nguyễn-Long’s work is the aesthetic of mộc mạc (meaning ‘earthy’). In her doctorate—the research that informs much of Nguyễn-Long’s current work—she utilises mộc mạc as a concept to shift the viewers’ mode of understanding from a “Western fine art” aesthetic toward a Vietnamese aesthetic. Rather than considering the work as playfully naïve, it seems far more apt to attempt to consider the work through the idea of mộc mạc—the tactile clay forms, simple in design and earthy in tones demonstrating a kind of artistic restraint. Yet for all their organic-ness, in the dim gallery, one feels hard pressed to say the experience supports this kind of aesthetic appreciation. Among the vessels, pellets, and poo-shaped dollops, are several of Nguyễn-Long’s recurring motifs, such as Vomit Girl, a figure that takes various forms. Vomit Girl is among the more audacious motifs that equate to their titular satire, as well as their seemingly subversive intentions. The Vomit Girl figures often present a kind of verticality that has them rising upward, like deities of a kind, while simultaneously spewing—varying in each incarnation. Among the cute little poo-pellets and decorative forms, the Vomit Girls are the main protagonists and certainly the most intriguing players in the show.
        While much of the literature that accompanies the exhibition speaks to “claiming space”, “community”, and examining “trauma”, it is difficult to deduce this from the objects themselves, which appear open to far more readily available interpretations (one could be forgiven for not doing the readings and interpreting them as part of the broader trend of zany ceramics). This struggle to determine the visual correlation between subject and object could, on the one hand, be argued as systemic of the practice-led PhD process that often finds artists going to great lengths to intellectualise their practice beyond the pragmatic, often resulting in seemingly outlandish claims. On the other hand, one could also argue that this show is perfectly befitting of a university gallery, asking viewers to craft abstruse associations between the logic of the artist and the forms on display.

Mai Nguyễn-Long’s Doba Nation is on display at the John Curtin Gallery, and runs 7 February – 17 April 2025.

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Image credits: All artworks by Mai Nguyễn-Long, on display at John Curtin Gallery. Photographed by the author.