KV DUONG

Duong’s paintings forgo more traditional materials of canvas or linen in favour of latex, which is poured onto wooden board or concrete floor, then dried, painted, stretched and resin-fibreglass coated on the reverse. As a medium, latex bears fetishistic and sensuous connotations, particularly in conversation with queer identity politics, evoking sexual fantasy and intimacy. Yet it is also connected with the rubber industry, referencing the history of rubber plantations under French colonial rule in Vietnam, which lasted from 1887 until 1954. As Duong foregrounds the materiality of his medium – his painting responding to the bubbles, surface impressions, films and ripples that form as latex dries – he asks us to consider the history of exploitation and extraction surrounding the Vietnamese rubber trade.

Duong’s compositions respond to real and imagined landscapes. Doorways, windows, and architectonic spaces honour the artist’s background as a structural engineer, and dreamlike natural landscapes are inspired by Vietnamese artist Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds, bucolic images of lakes that emerged in the collateral of the US-Vietnam War from 1954 to 1975. Other series depict gestures of queer intimacy, in delicately rendered UV prints of embraces between loved ones, or the explosive movements of the artist’s own body against the latex in his performance practice. Across his work, Duong considers the borders and confines of space in relation to LGBT history, and the exclusionary toolset of nation building and empire.

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, Bruton, and he will have his first solo exhibition with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in 2026. 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 Hypha Studios, London (2024); Chilli Art Projects, London (2024); Guts Gallery, London (2024); Maximillian Wölfgang Gallery, London (2024); Migration Museum, London (2024); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2023); Bomb Factory, London (2023); and Museum of The Home, London (2022), amongst others. In 2024, Duong received the Liquitex Award for Acrylic as part of 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 being awarded the Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant in 2023 and the Jerwood Arts New Work Fund in 2022.

Courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery