Who: KV Duong (b. 1980, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
Based in: London
Gallery: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
Why we care: At the recent opening of “Where Wound Becomes Water,” KV Duong’s first solo exhibition with London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, the artist came up to me with great enthusiasm, and asked, “Do you speak Cantonese?” As I nodded, I noticed a look of relief on Duong’s face. Examining his work, I immediately understood his reaction. His textured paintings on latex mounted on wooden frames are poignant explorations of the suppressed emotional realities of migrants and social minorities, whether they take the form of tranquil Vietnamese landscapes or mysterious wall-hung works incorporating family portraits. They are meant to be understood on an eye-to-eye level, rather than being judged from a top-down gaze.
Duong was born into an ethnically Chinese family in Vietnam and spoke both Cantonese and Vietnamese as a child. He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1987, during turbulent times in his native land, and then eventually moved to London. He was trained as a structural engineer before moving to art, earning an M.A. in painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2024. The lived experience of otherness, as a member of the diasporic ESEA (East and Southeast Asia) community and as a queer person has informed his practice—which, thank goodness, does not exoticize such otherness to please a Western eye. In Duong’s work, I see a solemn meditation on history, shaped by the tension between holding on to one’s cultural roots and forging a life far from home.
Up next: “Where Wound Becomes Water” runs through March 14. Duong will appear in an LGBTQ+-themed group show this summer in London; “Never the Same River: Movement, Migration, Media” at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, opening on August 3; and “The Unhomely: Explorations of Diaspora, Displacement and Belonging,” a group exhibition presented by Culture& at the Brampton Museum in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, this fall.
—Vivienne Chow
