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At the feet of Dag Girl and Aqua Mutt, Long haschosen to place acrylic mirrors, interspersedwith black acrylic squares, in a grid formation tocontrast the manufactured with the organic.These reflective surfaces also magically connectan imaginary sky to an imaginary water, provid-ing a practical viewing perspective underneathAqua Mutt and Dag Girl. Long wants the viewerto have a visible perspective of the hidden sidesof Dag Girl and Aqua Mutt i.e. the stomach andthe inner legs, so we do not miss Long’s manyobservations and to perhaps unbalance precon-ceived notions that Aqua Mutt must be male to‘play’ with Dag Girl.

Each Aqua Mutt and Dag Girl has a title, such asAqua Mutt in Drought, Dag Girl Being Evil, DagGirl Riding Aqua Mutt, Aqua Mutt in Flood, AquaMutt Whaling, Aqua Mutt on Oil Rig all gatheredfrom an ‘imaginary’ world travel of surf adven-tures that inadvertently led them through a smallwar-torn and poverty-stricken state, where AquaMutt possibly met Dag Girl and took her undertheir wing.10 With the titles comes what Longrefers to as Mutt Chat giving genesis to their‘origins and purpose’. The tallest Aqua Mutt atone hundred forty five centimetres is Aqua MuttSwimming in Cyberspace, with floating lettersand an assortment of uniquely shaped andcoloured sea life positioned around its coat. ThisAqua Mutt is in a two way conversation. Onepart of the dialogue is concerned with the differ-ent cultures that can be lifted from the internetwithout any reference to their cultural context,while the other side of the conversation is gazedin wonder and amazement …how all these peo-ple had their own way of seeing, all equallybeautiful.11 Then it shifts to a thinking out loudcomment where the guilt of copyright sets in,must be a nightmare.12 The dialogue reveals thehighs and lows of culture divided by those whocare and ones that don’t or worse those whoknow and watch while doing nothing. For Long,to have a past and know your history makes oneless vulnerable to the fast and vast informationavailable from cyber worlds and from those whofeed it.

Aqua Mutt with Sea Gypsies, the shortest AquaMutt at twenty nine centimetres, is learningabout the ocean and the environment by travel-ling with sea gypsies, but feeling sad about their

For Aqua Mutt: an Installation with Dag Girl Longhas hand crafted thirty pieces. Twenty five areindividual Aqua Mutts. Three of the twenty fourAqua Mutts directly play with Dag Girl, while twoof the nine Dag Girls have become as one or asa half with Aqua Mutt during a dream such as inDag Girl Dreaming of Aqua Mutt. Dag Girl is indi-vidually presented in four separate pieces.Together these two ‘identities’, merged and sep-arate, create an ambiguous space of fantasyand reality.

Long describes Aqua Mutt collectively as a con-ceptual gang of misfit mongrels fascinated bywater, while Dag Girl in this scrum of personali-ties represents a misfit orphan and anacquaintance of Aqua Mutt. The fascination forwater has been grafted from the Pho Dognamed Kelsey, one of the twelve Pho Dogswhich had water object references painted overits coat including a ferry, refugee boat, rowingboat, P&O cruise liner and a variety of otherboats. Long views Aqua Mutt as a ‘subculture’or subset creature of Pho Dog. From this sub-grafting, dog changes to mutt and becomes amongrel dog with simpleton connotations. Thismutt concentrates on an aqua life with all sortsof intersections - hence Aqua Mutt.

The inter-relationship of the two identities, DagGirl and Aqua Mutt, reveals a larger picture here.One represents an animal, the other human. Therelationship of animal and human can suggestthe beginning of a world that relied on eachother for economic, environmental, social andcultural sustainability. However, with the onsetof nineteenth and twentieth century industriali-sation and later corporatisation, human andanimal dissected. Long is possibly attempting toreverse the corporate contamination, or at leastexpose it. Long has said she wants Aqua Mutt tobe sociable, full of ‘fun’ or ‘everyone’s friend’,but also confront difficult questions in a ‘friendlyenvironment’. Aqua Mutt and Pho Dog6 are mul-tifarious mythical androgynous mongrels. ThePho Dogs symbolise a half-breed AsianAustralian hyphenation and hero because of itsmany facets, forms and its ability to survive.Aqua Mutt in contrast has a non heroic statusbecause according to Long, Aqua Mutt is in anidentity crisis possibly caused by Dag Girl. Also,choice of making two mythological beings in theinstallation announces the metaphysical and themagical within the journey, signaling a new hopeagainst a dehumanised environment devoid ofthe human scale.

Long has allowed the installation to be semi-autobiographical, using Dag Girl and Aqua Muttto tell private memories and desires, while pro-posing other possibilities. Behind Dag GirlSurfing Long is expressing the desire to learnhow to surf and to be part of the iconicAustralian pastime, more importantly connect-

ing to her partner’s devotion to surfing locallyand internationally. Aqua Mutt in Moonee Pondspays a bias homage to AFL (Australian FootballLeague) giants the Essendon Bombers ensuringall who appear on Aqua Mutt’s coat, includingthe AFL players, rowers, horse riders and evenSunday riders wear the famous red and blackcolours of Essendon. Again, Long is embracingan Australian-ism like a diplomatic gesture fornation and partner.

Packed together Dag Girl and Aqua Mutt createan installation where the community space istransitive, demanding, sheltering, playful andabsent. Their coats appear as ‘sponges’ to otherart styles, violence, consumerism, politics, sport-ing events and environmental disasters. Long’sreworking of the original representation (Pho Dog)and use of hybridisation and difference is a con-stant tactic. In Aqua Mutt in Asian Waters, whereVietnamese and Japanese representations arejuxtaposed to Anglo-Australian example, i.e.“Australia is little London”7, Long is placinggeneric identities that are ‘empty’ to the existingreality to reveal another meaning. While in AquaMutt Expanding the fear of past and future coloni-sation asks big questions of the oppressors ofchange and the spaces of vulnerability they cre-ate, in which Long asks and states …where isme, that is the whole problem .8

The thirty pieces are constructed or ‘born’ fromrecycled paper and avian mesh. The mesh ispacked with the paper and hand molded. Thelarger Aqua Mutts are reinforced with cookingchopsticks, whilst a number of the pieces fea-turing Dag Girl have internal ceramic plate basesto weigh them down. All the pieces are acrylicpainted papier-mâché, followed by an acrylicvarnish coating. The papier-mâché mediumevokes sensory memories of Long’s childhoodas a tactile and unpretentious artform. Later,papier-mâché was also appreciated on familytrips to the Philippine town of Paete. Althoughthese forms “were beautifully and perfectlydone”9 , in contrast Long explains she has car-ingly molded the Aqua Mutt and Dag Girl formsas purposefully imperfect in a kind of bid tolegitimise the ‘so-called flawed’ as opposed tothe corporate commodification of aesthetics.

Installations enable new possibilities for theexamination and presentation of space wherepainting and sculpture is sometimes unable toconfront the challenging socio-cultural issues ofa complex world. They have the capacity to hostreal interactions with materials, technology andideas that are profoundly affected by internaland external influences, where their interweav-ing offers a space for the interpretation ofconflict and problem resolution to create mean-ing. These areas of inquiry are largely around themargins, borders, intersections and in-betweenspaces. The challenge for Mai Long is how oneoperates or connects when these spaces, com-prising many different parts, are avoided. Dothese ‘spaces avoided’ produce emptiness orcreate meaning?

For more than a decade Long has observed andconfronted cross cultural, cross regional andcross disciplinary issues. Long has producedseries of works, mainly paintings and morerecently installations, featuring the motifs ofconsumerism, nationalism, religion and sexualimagery within a discourse of emptiness andmeaning. These productions strongly connect toand speak for Long’s generation.

Long was born in Hobart in 1970 to a Vietnamesefather of Buddhist background and an Australianmother of Irish descent, Catholic background.Her father came to Australia through theColombo Plan Scholarship program, introducedin 1951 by the Australian Government to buildstronger relationships with the Asian region.Long’s mother was a school teacher with a his-tory degree from the University of Tasmania.

From her earliest days Long’s life has been oneof transience. In 1975 the family of six moved toPapua New Guinea and in 1979 to thePhilippines, returning to Australia in 1989 whereLong undertook Asian Studies at the AustralianNational University (ANU). In 1992 she studiedand traveled in China. In 1994 Long joined lifedrawing students at the Hanoi University of FineArts, Vietnam and in 1996 was invited to under-

take a Master of Arts in Visual Arts at theQueensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Aqua Mutt: an Installation with Dag Girl is a newadventure evolving from Long’s 2006 installationfeaturing the mythical breed of mongrel PhoDog.2 Long has again used the bold discipline ofinstallation to expand her debate on the empti-ness and the complexity of contemporarytranscultural spaces to examine and sometimescelebrate meaning. Long is vulnerable, deter-mined and patient in between this spatialdiscussion of emptiness and meaning. This isthe same sort of emptiness Max Ernst (whoinfluenced Long’s thinking) felt during World WarI. A Dadaist and pure Surrealist, he announced“the exhibition of feelings is against my feel-ings”.3 Long is a Postmodernist with Ernst’snihilist tendencies, at least conceptually. Thereis not one single truth and just perhaps, there isno truth.

Closer to home Gordon Hookey, an Australianpainter and installation artist of Long’s genera-tion, expresses his ‘emptiness’ towards theAustralian Government’s attitude to indigenousAustralians, for instance the comments uttered bythe former Minister for Reconciliation Hon. PhillipRuddock to a French journalist from Le Monde:

“If they had invented the wheel they may havebeen able to escape our initial onslaughts whenthe white settlers arrived, it’s really their own fault.”

From this comment Hookey created Ruddock’sWheel,4 a fete elephant wheel as the centrepiece with fifteen paintings providing an alterna-tive vision of Indigenous Australia. Long andHookey are similar, not because they primarilystarted off as painters who embraced installa-tion and with comparative styles, or for beingPostmodernist within a socio-cultural contextwith powerful conceptual and visual punches.Rather, it is the critique of their generation’s pas-sion for rewriting repression, omission andexploitation that makes them stand out artists.

Quantifying the influence of other artists onLong’s practice, there are a number of consis-tencies there that always appear within herwork. The most important influences on Long’swork are from the Filipino artists Onib Olmedo,Ang Kiukok, and Juan Luna (principally theSpoliarium of 1884). Of the three Olmedo hasthe most currency. Long interviewed Olmedoand wrote an essay at a very formative period,as a student at the International School, Manilain 1988. Olmedo was inspired by the Europeanmodernist movements of Postimpressionism(Vincent Van Gogh), Expressionism (EdvardMunch) and Cubism, with an overriding beliefthat the act of painting be seen as an exercise offreedom, social commentary and having a viewof the world beyond the eyes.5 Juan Luna’spaintings come from the nineteenth centuryRomanticism period such as artist EugeneDelacroix. Another influential artist and move-ment to Long’s work is Expressionist GeorgeGrosz, such as the painting The City (1916), themass popular culture movement of Pop Art andChris O’Doherty’s Mambo style.

Emptiness, Meaning and the Spaces In-between…moving in and out of different cultures and different realities…you are always trying to read what is going on and you read it wrong.1

Kelsey, one of the twelve original Pho Dog 2006Dag Girl Dreaming of Aqua Mutt, detail: Aqua Mutt: an Installation with Dag Girl

Shortest and tallest AquaMutts: Aqua Mutt with SeaGypsies beside Aqua MuttSwimming in Cyberspace, asdisplayed on reflective gridsurface, detail: Aqua Mutt: anInstallation with Dag Girl

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nomadic life because it is preventing them fromhaving a ‘voice’, even with the worlds’ attentionon them during the great tsunami.13 The use ofnarrative as annexure to the pieces in the instal-lation is a new development in Long’s work.Long has used text in her past installations,paintings, drawings and prints but not as ascripted text for a performance or film as in thisinstallation. This is a positive development in herwork because it is exposing this emptiness andvulnerability Long feels and the depression thatcan be created from those who have producedthis feeling.

The dialogue has also served Long’s desire todraw out the absorbing character of Aqua Muttwhere they are aware but not ‘engaged’ with theglobal movement of ideas as Long has stated Idon’t want my Aqua Mutts to be dumb but toappear they are dumb.14 What does being dumbmean in the context of the installation? ForLong, the Aqua Mutt expresses a personal psy-chological drama,15 because in between thefantasy narratives of Aqua Mutt and Dag Girl isa reality revealing an entangled social strife thatreproduces the reigning ideology and logocen-tric system that practices sexism, racism, andauthoritarianism.16 Long is careful not to place‘important’ motifs, such as religious icons fromBuddhism, Christianity and Islam in areas of theAqua Mutt that may feed disapproval or add tothe social chaos. Instead Long has empoweredthe Aqua Mutt to defend equality at everyopportunity. With Aqua Mutt in Flood, in thedestructive force of a tsunami, the Islamicmosque and Christian church are destroyed.Long brings together the unifying spacebetween the two religious symbols, but only asa result of a natural disaster. In contrast, Long iscomfortable with placing the AFL logo on AquaMutt’s behind highlighting a different perspec-tive of power that operates.

Mai Long has presented one of her most inno-vative artworks. Aqua Mutt: an installation withDag Girl offers many different possibilities in-between the spaces of a mutt and a girl, ametaphorical water journey and a semi-autobi-ographical narrative in the context of offering anew reference of understanding for Long’s gen-eration. Through the installation process Longhas discovered for us that a discourse on

emptiness is a ‘dusting’ of spaces forgotten bythose who are able to and those who are not,and when these spaces are juxtaposed againstconcepts of emptiness, a balance of meaningis created then avoided.

Kon Gouriotis OAMExecutive DirectorCasula Powerhouse July 2007

Notes:1 Kon Gouriotis, Mai Long interview, 18 April 2007.2 Mai Long, Artist Statement in I love Pho catalogue, Casula

Powerhouse Arts Centre, 2006. 3 Lucy R. Lippard, Changing essays in art criticism, A Dutton

Paperback, 1971.4 Dr John von Sturmer, Ruddock’s Wheel, Kon Gouriotis dis-

cussion with Dr John von Sturmer, Casula Powerhouse ArtsCentre and Liverpool Regional Museum program July –December 2001.

5 Cited Mai Long, Onib Olmedo: Filipino Artist, IB essay, May1988.

6 Dr. Boitran Huynh-Beattie, I love Pho catalogue introduction,Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, June 2006. Pho Dog wasexhibited in I Love Pho between the 8 – 17 June 2006 at theLiverpool Regional Museum, a project of the CasulaPowerhouse. The Pho Dog was commissioned for the exhi-bition and acquired for the Casula Powerhouse Collection.Boitran writes Mai Long‘s work, Pho Dog, might surprisesome viewers; by means of a Pop Art effect, she conveys herinsolence and audacity on the subject. Mai is a hybrid, of aVietnamese father and an Australian mother, and these mon-grel dogs could be interpreted as self-mocking, whilepointing to Pho’s hybridity. Pho originated in Viet Nam duringthe French colonial era, drawing on Chinese spices,enhanced by delicate herbs from the Vietnamese cuisine.The images that Mai Long has painted on her twelve PhoDogs narrate Viet Nam’s historical, political and social bonds:Hero Dog, Conflict Dog, Boat Dog, and so on; Fauna Dog isdecorated with images of toad, rooster, pig and buffalo, inthe tradition of Vietnamese Dong Ho folk prints. TheseVietnamese motifs are intermingled with Australian refer-ences: kangaroo, Tasmanian devil and koala, in so much thatthe dog seems to embrace the childhood of anAsian–Australian. However, the Vietnamese homeland ofMai’s father remains a myth, and these dogs allude to herfascination and ceaseless questioning, with a work that res-onances the ‘snapping’ voice of Linh Dinh’s Pho Poems.

7 Mai Long, Mai Long notes on exhibition, 27 May 2007.8 Kon Gouriotis, Mai Long interview, 20 May 2007.9 Kon Gouriotis, Mai Long interview, 20 May 2007.10 Mai Long, Mai Long notes on exhibition, 27 May 2007.11 Mai Long, Mai Long notes on exhibition, 27 May 2007.12 Mai Long, Mai Long notes on exhibition, 27 May 2007.13 Mai Long, Mai Long notes on exhibition, 27 May 2007.14 Kon Gouriotis, Mai Long interview, 27 May 2007.15 Kon Gouriotis, Mai Long interview, 27 May 2007.16 Vincent B. Leitch, Postmodernism Local Effects, Preface pp.

ix, Global Flows, State University of New York Press, 1996

THANK YOU I would like to thank all myfriends, family, and colleagues without whomthis project could never have happened. I especially would like to thank the IncineratorArts Complex, Kon Gouriotis OAM for writingthe essay and for the invaluable insights anddiscussions, Dr Gabrielle Gwyther for editingthe essay, Stuart Horstman for overall techni-cal assistance and support, and Leah Haynesfor vision, planning, media, publicity, andsponsorship advice. (Mai Long July 2007)

aqua mutt : an installation with dag girl by mai long

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www.mai-long.com

Cover Image : Left to right: Aqua Mutt Expanding,Aqua Mutt in Moonee Ponds, Aqua Mutt HoldingWater; centre: Dag Girl Riding Aqua Mutt, detail: AquaMutt an installation with Dag Girl.

A view of the ‘gang’ as displayed on reflective grid surface of acrylic mirror and black squares, detail: Aqua Mutt: an Installation with Dag Girl

Exhibition Dates: 22 August-16 SeptemberLaunch: 2-4pm Saturday 25 August 2007

The Atrium GalleryIncinerator Arts Complex180 Holmes Rd, Moonee Ponds VIC 3039 (Melway 28 D7)Open: Wed to Sun 11am–4pmPhone: (03) 8325 1750

Dag Girl Surfing,detail: Aqua Mutt: an Installation withDag Girl

Wine byThe Cups Estate Mornington Peninsula

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