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Urn, mudskippers no legs 2024

Accession No.
2024.477
Date Created
2024
Gallery location
Not on public display
Department
Contemporary Asian Art
Dimensions A
15.5 x 33 x 33cm
Media Category
Installation
Medium
Coarse clay fired to 1220 degrees Celsius (black with refractory grog), teeth marks
Place Created
Bulli
Credit Line
Commissioned for APT11. Purchased 2024. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Mai Nguyễn-Long describes her Vomit Girl sculptures as ‘contemporary folkloric forms’, using mistranslation and wordplay to reflect on disconnection from identity and language. Inspired by carved wooden figures found in Vietnamese đình – communal houses central to village life – Nguyễn-Long reimagines the deities as hybrid clay creatures of her own invention. Infused with humour, ambiguity and personal mythology, these figures transform spiritual unease into resilience.

Two recurring visual motifs anchor the series. The doba (đình bombshell axis) references a village bell replaced with a bombshell, symbolising adaptation and survival. The coiled, sinuous worana (worm dragon snake) draws on the transformation of the Chinese dragon into a gentler Vietnamese aesthetic. Together, these motifs explore shifting cultural power and meaning, recasting inherited symbols through the artist’s own diasporic lens.
 

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© Mai Nguyễn-Long

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Stories featuring this object

A detail view of grotesque clay sculptures in bright orange and earth tones
APT11

Mai Nguyễn-Long: Vomit Girl

Read ESSAY

Exhibitions featuring this object

A view of a sculptural work made out of glowing red forms, installed on a gallery wall

‘The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial’

Nov 2024 - Apr 2025

Raja Ravi Varma's Laxmi 1894, printed by the Ravi Varma Press c.1910–20, garlanded with flowers for the official opening of 'The God of Small Things', QAG, September 2025 / © The artists / Photograph: N Umek, QAGOMA

'The God of Small Things'

Sep 2025 - Oct 2026

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