IAC Art Talks Series 3 Lecture 2: Vomit Girl Beyond Diasporic Trauma by Dr Mai Nguyễn-Long (Catch up Online)
This event was held on 24 July 2025.
Abstract
In 2008,my artwork Phở Dog was condemned by respected spokespersons in the Vietnamese diasporic communityas ‘communist propaganda.’ As an Australian artist of Vietnamese descent, I learnt my father’s native tongue as a young adult during my time in the north of the country. Later I would be criticised for speaking with a ‘communist accent.’ These formative experiences became the departure point for Vomit Girl Beyond Diasporic Trauma, a practice-based research project that examines how acculturated intergenerational trauma gives rise to binary identities and fixed narratives that prevent meaningful reconnection with ‘homelands.’ This research project proposes that contemporary art can draw from folkloric strategies to open up spaces for suppressed, hidden, and new stories to emerge beyond diasporic trauma.
The project begins with a revisit to my 1994 encounters with ‘village arts’ on the river plains of northern Vietnam. Close studies of artefacts, specifically đình woodcarvings, and the rich cultural and spiritual life of the village reveal folkloric practices as the key to this project’s analysis of continuously evolving grassroots resilience. Within the context of the resurgence of popular religion in Vietnam today, my research project considers how these cultural expressions of spiritual resistance can inform a creative strategy that decolonises trauma and reconnects with Vietnam. By intersecting contemporary art with folkloric practices, and drawing from Jill Bennett’s empathic vision, Griselda Pollock’s insight into the colonising power of trauma, and Bracha Ettinger’s artworking method, my decolonising strategy aims to both disarm the colonising power of trauma, and rewrite the trauma caused by social, cultural, and political colonisation.
This practice-based research delves deep into folkloric practices and creative strategies employed by Vietnam-based contemporary artists Đặng Thị Khuê, Phi Phi Oanh, Nguyễn Bảo Toàn, and Nguyễn Khắc Quân, to create a new body of work, The Vomit Girl Project: Vigit-Worana-Doba. My artworks transform the mộc mạc of woodcarvings into naked clay sculptures of Vomit Girl, the central figure of these previously hidden stories and a celebration of marginality. The transfiguration of Phở Dog into Vomit Girl constitutes and contributes to my creative decolonising strategy. This new body of work and my exegetical investigation suggest that interconnecting contemporary art with folkloric practices in Vietnam can offer a space where cultural heterogeneity, marginalised narratives, and open-ended political modes of subjectivity can coexist and thrive.
About the Speaker
Dr Mai Nguyễn-Long is an artist, academic and storyteller whose transient upbringing informs the tapestry of narratives that live through her work. Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father from Sa Đéc in Đồng Tháp province and a 4th generation Australian mother of Irish-Samoan descent, Nguyễn-Long’s formative years were spent living in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.
Nguyễn-Long’s early academic commitments included Asian Studies, Art History, and Museum Studies. These experiences led to her work with an international health organization, becoming a 1999 Australian Youth Ambassador for Development with the Ministry of Health in Fiji. Since 1996 Mai has exhibited across a range of mediums including painting, drawing, media, mixed media sculptures and installation. In 2006 Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre commissioned ‘Phở Dog’, a work which would later have seminal impact on the development of her future creative practice.
As an adult, Nguyễn-Long lived in Australia and China. However, it was her reconnection with Vietnam that has had the most profound influence on the aesthetic and theoretical direction of her art. In 2015 a Copyright Agency Cultural Fund residency in the Hanoi ceramics village of Bát Tràng introduced Mai to clay. In 2023 she completed a practice-based doctoral program with her PhD thesis titled Vomit Girl Beyond Diasporic Trauma: Interconnecting Contemporary Art and Folkloric Practices in Vietnam at the University of Wollongong.
In 2022 she received much acclaim for her work in the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, with her newly commissioned ‘Specimen (Permeate)’ and ‘Vomit Girl (Berlin)’ clay sculptures. Curated by Kader Attia, the curatorial focus was decolonisation and repair. The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial for Contemporary Art at QAGOMA is currently exhibiting Nguyễn-Long’s most ambitious installation to date, titled ‘The Vomit Girl Project 2024’. The artist now lives and works in Dharawal country, Bulli, and is represented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin.
