KV DUONG

The exhibition’s namesake takes the form of a five-panel painting of a bomb pond in rural Vietnam. Duong’s Bomb Pond series depicts the present-day bodies of water that have formed in the thousands of craters left by the Vietnam War, as nearly three million tons of explosives were dropped by U.S. forces between 1964 and 1973. Painted here in fiery hues against the natural yellow of his fleshy latex surface, Duong depicts scarred land, a nation’s topography shaped by violence. Duong draws upon Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana’s 2009 Bomb Ponds series, images of seemingly tranquil ponds amidst rice paddies and forests, eerie scenes that conceal their devastating history. Duong’s polyptych demands solemnity and contemplation, weighty plaques for the millions of lives destroyed by conflict, and a recognition of the resilience of his birthplace and its people.

In works that consider notions of home, family, and heritage, Duong reenacts the diasporic experience of a Vietnamese-British household. He transforms a gallery wall into a domestic hallway; an imagining of an alternative British upbringing had his family emigrated from Vietnam to London rather than Toronto in 1987. Hung against wallpaper and mass-produced dado boards, Duong presents intimate individual family portraits on latex in found vintage frames. Their red backgrounds reference the communist flag colours of Vietnam and China, while the glowing, corporeal surfaces evoke traditional Vietnamese lacquer painting. Likewise, in large-scale diptychs Family Portrait (2025) and Family Assembly (2025), the artist fragments, multiplies, prints, and paints images of his extended family from 1986, their final year together in Vietnam. The blurred multiplicity of their faces alludes to the flawed universal portrayal of the ESEA (East and South East Asia) community within Western culture. A pair of children’s chairs, made with latex and found items, lends a child-like tenderness to this scene of anemoia - the nostalgia for a time and place never experienced. As Duong sources second-hand objects, he engages with borrowed pasts, a blending of personal memory with collective experience. He considers the significance of home within the contradictory politics of diasporic belonging.

Working in his signature latex, a medium that begins as a liquid poured onto a wooden board, before it is dried, painted, stretched, and reinforced on the reverse with a resin-fibreglass composite, Duong references his background in structural engineering. The material carries fetishistic and sensual associations, particularly in relation to queer identity politics, evoking desire, fantasy, and intimacy. Yet it also connects to the rubber industry, recalling the exploitative plantations that operated during French colonial rule in Vietnam from 1887 until 1954. Motifs of doors and portals recur, spaces of access and exclusion, reflecting both LGBTQ+ and postcolonial narratives. As Duong highlights his medium’s complexities in bubbles, ripples, and impressions, he prompts us to pause and consider the history of his place of birth, of the legacies of violence, injustice and forced relocation that cloud his understanding of home.

KV Duong (b. 1980, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) lives and works in London. He received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2024. In 2025 he was included in An Uncommon Thread at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, and took part in a residency with Vietnam Art Collection (VAC), Hanoi. Recent solo exhibitions include Between This Body and the World, Harlesden High Street, London (2024) and Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here, Migration Museum, London (2022). Group exhibitions include Jogia 18 Biennale, Java (2025); Cardion Arts, London (2025); ai Gallery, London (2025); Hypha Studios, London (2024); Chilli Art Projects, London (2024); Guts Gallery, London (2024); Migration Museum, London (2024); Bomb Factory, London (2023); Museum of The Home, London (2022); and Kingsgate Project Space (2022), amongst others. In 2024, Duong received the Liquitex Award through the Cass Art Prize, and was also awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Achievement Scholarship at the Royal College of Art, London. These followed the artist’s earlier awards: Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant in 2023 and Jerwood Arts New Work Fund in 2022.

Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.